Goodbye drop down menu!

Around 1,5 years, as some of you might remember, we took the first steps towards stripping away our "drop down menu" (that thing that folds out when you hover "Community" in the top menu for instance). There were two reasons we wanted to get rid of it:

• It didn't work very well with touch devices (tablets and smartphones).
• It was not very intuitive. New users were especially, were more confused that they needed to be. And we all know that confusing games are horrible games.

You can read more about these points in this blog post from last year.

Making a change like this is not something you "just" do. For the last 1,5 years, we've been making a number of minor preparatory improvements to the site every now and then. All done with the same greater goal mind: getting rid of the drop down menus. Most recently, we've redesigned the Help page so that it works without its drop down companions.

We therefore very happy to announce that the drop down menus are gone at last. If you haven't noticed, it is online already! Hurray!

When doing this redesign, we had to adjust some of the pages to fit the new with of the "content area". Examples of such pages are the bid, auction and player search pages that've all been redesigned.

This improvements yields the following benefits:

• Touch device friendly. The concept of "hovering a button with your mouse" does not make any sense on touch devices. And since touch devices are getting increasingly more popular as a device for playing Virtual Manager, we have to react to this. The new menu works much better on such devices. As a side not, I'd like to mention that the upcoming tactics editor also support touch devices.
• Uniform navigation. Prior to this update, we used a lot of different menu types: For instance, Community (in the top menu) used drop downs. Clubhouse used a left aligned side navigation. Cup pages used a tab menu. Now, everything runs with the same streamlined navigation style. So harmonious :-)
• Easier for newcomers. There's no doubt the many different and unintuitive menu styles have affected new users impression of the game negatively. And as a company we'd like to focus on new users' experience since this leads to more customers. And this in turn, lets us work on the really fun things, like the new match simulator. So if new users are happier, everybody (including the experienced users) wins.

As always with changes like these, there'll be some bugs. We are ready to accept your bug reports - so please do write us if you stumble upon anything weird regarding the new look.

Please spend an hour or two getting used to the new look and feel - and let us then know what you think. We'd love to get some feedback :-)