As a new user to the forum, and liking the overall usability, one thing that was somewhat difficult was finding a quote button. After not finding one, I tried the reply button and was happy to see it quoted the response I wanted to quote.
But finding the reply button is somewhat tricky. It's not located next to the post content, where I was looking. Instead, it's buried far away in the right hand corner, over 120 px south of the text in a single-line comment like this, and 800 px east in a typical comment like this (1280 px wide typical screen). In fact, I first clicking on the orange "New" button, as that's where the reply/quote button would typically be.
Further complicating the issue is that the reply button is separated from the post by the signature line. While this does make logical sense, the signature line has the effect of further detaching the reply link from the post, especially if the user has a tall signature. See this post for an example. In fact, in that post, it almost looks like the reply button belongs to the post below.
I have three suggestions for improving things:
- Align the #, Like, and Reply links to top of the signature area instead of the bottom
- Reducing the width of the signature separator to 300ish pixels. Posts without a signature (and thus no signature bar) are far less confusing.
- Increasing the size of the #, Like, and Reply links so people see (and use) them. I haven't used the Like feature yet, because I'm a lazy human being and it's too much effort to find and mouse-over such a tiny target.
Alternatively, moving the entire messageMeta div in front of the messageContent div would solve the problem.
