Critique My F-List

[Caligula]

Lately, I've been very active in seeking roleplays with one particular character (Gabrielle), but I've gotten little to no approaches or responses to my own approaches. I'm looking for some outside opinions now to see where I could be going wrong here.

 

[Caligula]

I don't see anything inherently wrong with the F-List, though I'd recommend putting the top bits (bio, etc.) into your thread instead of the F-List. The way the alignment is on the F-List makes it literally impossible for me to read anything beyond the centered bits at the top, so all I'm really able to see or critique is the short, centered blurb with the progress bars up top and the kinks themselves.​

Now I can see the indents are making it a little hard to view on mobile so I'm gonna adjust that and see what works.

 

[Caligula]

I'm not even on mobile, lol. I'm on a laptop, and the alignment just makes everything a bit confusing to the eye. Looks nice if you RP with her on F-List, but I'd definitely recommend copying/pasting the bio bits onto the search thread as well; I'd be a lot more likely to read a bio if it's made easy to look at.

Yeah, I thought that might be an issue. I'll re-work the search thread sometime and add all the necessary info.

 

[Dr Bellwright]

Visual / Usability Critique:

• Name, Age, etc: Use colon ( : ) instead of period. Period means STOP. You could try and re-educate people to your own visual language, but you can't change the way F-List works, for example on the left there is a list that using colon under the user picture – so what I see is inconsistency in visual language. Because you are hosting your content within F-List visual language I wouldn't stray too far away, it created certain expectations.
• Bio, Playlist, etc – I'd rather see Title Case than lower case, and periods are unnecessary detail, and just adds to overall inconsistency.
• Contrast for the body text in the collapsable items (bio, playlist) is horrible. I didn't even bother to read it, it's not comfortable experience to read bad contrast.
• I'm not sure the meaning of the small print (text in smaller size), usually small print means - we don't think you need to read it, but here it is. Like copyright notices, links to various policies, etc, or when companies trying to hide certain information that they obligated to include by law. I don't understand the usage of small print in your context. Also usage of small print can have adverse effect, for example as somebody who is in my 30s – I avoid reading small text, while I enjoyed it in my early 20 (and I had some designs to prove it), which could be used in case you want to filter people out.

 

[skyfetcher]

I'm not gonna shoot it down completely, but I do find the aesthetic used to be pretty unnecessary. I'm more into simplicity with this sort of thing, so I don't imagine I'm the audience anyways, but sometimes it's worth curbing it a little when you end up with replies like the above posts.

The main issue for me isn't that it really murders usability so much as it just doing absolutely nothing for me. It won't come in useful for the play and has strong diminishing returns in being helpful, so all I'm really gunning for is concise portrayal of what's interesting to know. I'm not exactly in agreement with the above on colons instead of periods due to how the body text is formatted in general. Comparing it to the sidebar on the left at all makes for an utterly inconsistent portrayal in all aspects between font, color, positioning, and so on; once you make the break, I don't think it matters where you go from there if you're dead set on being fancy. You've already split, so what's the difference; the meaningful change to indicate 'thing - answer' is already done through color and font, the latter of which makes me go slightly 'eh', but the former of which is nice.

What I do agree with are the comments on small text and on contrast. I'm sensitive to poor contrast, and the color pick straight up wasn't good (Not the worst I've seen though, not by far; you're not the partner I recently had who decided a dark color in the blue tones was great dialogue text for a BMR message). The small text is just a nuisance; the economy on space creates an economy on my willingness to read. Such is often the trouble with a heavy lean into aesthetic - curious choices are made where design is overwhelmingly focused on for good old usability in reading it.

I assume or at least hope more OOC substance is found in the threads she's pitched in; plenty about the character, little of use about, well, you. There's merit to making a summary of sorts for the character in the threads she's in.

Small disclaimer, I'm otherwise not the target audience; the character seems pretty limited as far as what she wants to do with the persistent focus on the canons she exists in, so I've already kinda filtered her out among other taste preferences. If you want her to be more flexible in use, may wish to make that more clear; if not, nothing that can really be done. I pretty much limit my commentary to the portrayal.

 

[Caligula]

I'm not sure I want to throw away the aesthetic completely, but I'll work on making the profile easier to read (particularly cutting down on centered text). I'll keep tweaking until it's something more accessible for others but still aesthetically pleasing to me. Thanks for the advice, everyone.

 

[Dirty Fingers]

I have always used F List just for the kink list so that is the first time I have seen what is basically a RT done like that. So some of this may be my own inexperience and confusion with the format but... The OOC part - It say Not actively seeking RP's? Is that just the default setting because if it isn't that tells me the person isn't all that keen to find a partner?

For me the format of that site is a little plain and I am primarily more interested in plot ideas so for me that is the first thing I look for so it took a little time to adjust to looking at that site and finding they were listed under Verses. Not your fault as that is the system. Perhaps with your ideas you could list what you hope to explore in them? For example: Whatever kinks may fit, Themes, emotions and psychology of characters etc. Something that gives the reader an idea of where you would like to go with all of this.

 

[Dirty Fingers]

I have always used F List just for the kink list so that is the first time I have seen what is basically a RT done like that. So some of this may be my own inexperience and confusion with the format but... The OOC part - It say Not actively seeking RP's? Is that just the default setting because if it isn't that tells me the person isn't all that keen to find a partner?

For me the format of that site is a little plain and I am primarily more interested in plot ideas so for me that is the first thing I look for so it took a little time to adjust to looking at that site and finding they were listed under Verses. Not your fault as that is the system. Perhaps with your ideas you could list what you hope to explore in them? For example: Whatever kinks may fit, Themes, emotions and psychology of characters etc. Something that gives the reader an idea of where you would like to go with all of this.

 

[Caligula]

I have always used F List just for the kink list so that is the first time I have seen what is basically a RT done like that. So some of this may be my own inexperience and confusion with the format but... The OOC part - It say Not actively seeking RP's? Is that just the default setting because if it isn't that tells me the person isn't all that keen to find a partner?

For me the format of that site is a little plain and I am primarily more interested in plot ideas so for me that is the first thing I look for so it took a little time to adjust to looking at that site and finding they were listed under Verses. Not your fault as that is the system. Perhaps with your ideas you could list what you hope to explore in them? For example: Whatever kinks may fit, Themes, emotions and psychology of characters etc. Something that gives the reader an idea of where you would like to go with all of this.

Yeah, the OOC parts says that because in F-Chat (where a lot of people on that site go to RP), people can mark themselves as Online, Looking, Away, Busy, and Do Not Disturb. Usually, I'll see other character profiles list what those mean so people know when they're looking for an RP or just want to chill in the chat rooms, so I thought I should add that to mine.

Also, looking at my profile on the default blue theme made me realize why it's been so hard on people's eyes lol. I'll probably have to play around with some other text color if I keep linking that particular profile here.