Gday Adnan,

I find the Clickr theme particularly hard to read because of its large margins. The extra space these margins take up further squashes the dashboard columns, which because of the addition of user portraits effectively increases the number of columns from two to three.

The resulting columns run into multiple lines, which are not separated with a dividing line in the Clickr theme. This makes it difficult to interpret the information as a table.

This is ironic because I'm a big fan of the Clickr theme, mostly because it has automatic margins. I don't like text that runs from edge to edge because it's hard to read. Without the Clickr theme I add margins manually using empty column macros.

The case in point is the Recently Updated section. If you look at a single line you'll see two lines of text to the left and one to the right, with a portrait stuck in the middle. All of these objects are centre-justified vertically, and thus do not line up with each other. This is difficult to interpret. Is it a table? Does the information on the left relate in any way to the information on the right? Is it just a grid? The way it is at the moment it requires an assumption or prior knowledge, such as from a previous theme.

I think you'd make the page much more readable if you reduced the portrait size (24x24 might work), and put it at the beginning or end of the row. Then you can justify the text cells so that they run across the same line. That way you might not need to put a separating line in to differentiate between rows.

Ben, could you elaborate on how the space descriptions clutters up the Clickr theme?

Ben, I understand that the Dashboard is becoming denser with the additional information that we are providing for spaces and for the recent changes list. We want to provide richer information to our users through the Dashboard, but your point is quite valid that we shouldn't go over the top. Unfortunately, we have no current plans to allow users to revert to the older scheme or toggle space descriptions and user photos.

I am glad to hear that you've found a workaround. Also, obviously if a space does not have a description, then you will get a cleaner list of spaces. As to the user photos, we would really like to highlight the people that participate in a Confluence instance and we've found that many users appreciate being able to see who they are talking with. In the future we will be moving further towards showing user photos and avatars.

We will definitely keep your comments in mind for future designs. Thank you for your suggestion.

Gday Scott.

I can't provide a screenshot at the moment: I only have a production system to work from and have already worked around the layout issues.

Basically I used the Confluence Classic theme and deleted all of the Space Descriptions. The end result was pretty close to the pre-2.6 dashboard layout.

My beef with the new layout is that the information that could once be shown on a single page now consumes multiple pages. This is for two reasons: the first is because the space descriptions are now displayed, which we don't need and don't want; the second is that the recently updated rows now include a user portrait, which we definitely don't need and don't want.

What makes all this especially frustrating is that these changes have been made without giving us the means of turning them off. Of minor frustration is that the new Recently Updated tables are difficult to decipher and take up too much space.

Ben - could you perhaps provide a screenshot showing your layout so that we can see the issues that you face?

The layout can be made a little better by shortening the space names; this makes the Spaces column to the left narrower, freeing up more space for the other two columns. It's still far from ideal, however.