Simplicity is the key (part 1)

One of the key aspects of BrainKing 3.0 (not released yet) is make its pages as simple as possible, which is a direct opposite to our former approach - to concentrate as many information on a single page as it can keep. There is a couple of very good reasons for this decision:

• Speed
  • Problem: The more elements (text, images, tables, ...) a page contains, the longer the total load time is. It is usually not a big problem for people with a fast connection to our site but everybody knows that the internet is not, uh, a homogeneous entity and it can easily happen that a page, which was displayed in a wink of an eye yesterday, can take 10 seconds to render today.
  • Solution: Extremely long tables with 5000 started games will not be used anymore. All elements of this kind will be, by default, limited to, say, max 20 rows and providing a "show more" link to display a longer list only on a user demand.


• Settings
  • Problem: Users require improvements and new features, we implement them and since not everyone is happy with new functionality that suddenly appears at BrainKing pages, we create options to turn them on/off or change some parameters. Then another feature requests emerge, we implement them, etc. etc. The outcome is a long and complicated Settings page with tens of switches which an average user might never modify and if so, he can be easily confused and change something wrong.
  • Solution: Only the most fundamental options will be displayed at the Settings page and their count should not exceed 10. There will be an Expert Options tab to enable access to all possible switches if someone wants to experiment with them, of course.


• Sorting
  • Problem: BrainKing contains a couple of tables that can be sorted by any column if a user click at the particular column header. Although it may look like an useful feature, it is, in fact, a source of several issues. Many users clicks the headers incidentally and then do not know how to reset the original sorting. It is very difficult (on even impossible in some cases) to optimize database tables to return requested rows sorted by all possible columns and it usually leads to a slowdown of the whole database server, which negatively impacts all BrainKing users. Last but not least, our statistics say that only a minority of users actually changes sorting rules for the mentioned tables.
  • Solution: Customizable sorting will be removed at all, except short lists (like country names) where the performance is not the issue. Instead, a system of customizable filters will be applied. For instance, in a list of user's started games, click "Chess" to show only Chess games, click "Fencer" to show only games with this person, etc. It will be simpler, more effective and much faster for everyone.

To be continued (it is a good practice to split long texts to more short entries, otherwise nobody would read them ).