Wish we had a better introductory Go website + goban applet!

[Hayang]

Hello everyone! I'm Hayang, and I'm a college student who leads a Go club.

I worked as a web designer and front-end developer for a couple years, and when I discovered the game of Go I was surprised by the clunky, stuck-in-the-90s designs of our online community's websites and web applications. I think the game of Go could be spread much better across various contexts if we had a couple of excellently designed/developed web applications to share with anyone who was interested in learning Go. I'm sure you have thought so too.

Among the things that would be the biggest help to spreading Go include:
- A beautiful and easy-to-use website that introduces the rules of Go in an interactive way.
The interactive way to play Go is the closest thing to this as far as I know, but IWTG could benefit so much from a more attractive design. Other good resources are locked away in sites like cyberoro/wbaduk. Books are not as friendly or fun to beginners.

- A embeddable, resizable goban web applet that looks great.
Eidogo seems to be the highest-quality plugin available at the moment, and if it were just width-responsive and perhaps reskinnable, it would be flexible enough to be incredibly useful for teaching websites and online lectures. I unfortunately don't have the JS expertise to develop this javascript goban applet, but if such an applet existed, I think I could develop an amazing website to serve as a first-point-of-entry to beginners who are interested in learning about Go.

For now, I have been using Powerpoint presentations to teach club members, and they have been extremely effective in teaching the rules and basic concepts with zero confusion. I plan to release a "Club starter" suite of presentation/teaching materials in the near future on sites like L19.

Here are some screenshots:


At some point I'd like to turn these presentations into interactive websites.

Do you guys agree that the community could benefit from some well-designed and developed web tools?
(Developers, do you know about any current development projects in Go?)

Also, are there any developers here who are vaguely interested in developing stuff like these?

[DrStraw]

While I agree that it may not do any harm I do not think it is necessary. Go attracts a certain type of person and I am not sure how much that sort of person is attracted by that kind of stuff. Sure, it may attract some temporary passersby, but I don't think it will make a lot of different with long term adherents.

Having said that, I have to say that the kids I try to teach cannot concentrate on anything longer than two seconds if it doesn't have an exciting web interface.

[lemmata]

Do you guys agree that the community could benefit from some well-designed and developed web tools?

Yes. You sure have a way of phrasing the question so that I cannot disagree. Hehe.

[Hayang]

I agree that certain types of people will stick with the game and naturally have more motivation to learn!

I also would add though that a bad first learning experience can really kill the potential for a person to be interested in the game. I have had much more success teaching Go with the help of interactive presentations than without them. In the right contexts they can be very effective.

Of course, we are not out to spread Go like it is the gospel, but I think having good resources at hand can really help us to interest the people we want to reach. Like in my case, I've thought many times that it'd be nice to have a good website to guide club members through ladders, nets, and other simple concepts without making the experience feel like homework.

[DrStraw]

Like in my case, I've thought many times that it'd be nice to have a good website to guide club members through ladders, nets, and other simple concepts without making the experience feel like homework.

I thought we did already. Those screenshots in the first post would turn me off completely. But then I don't spend my entire live glued to one of those interactive devices which most people seem to have.

[Bonobo]

I think this is a great idea!

I agree that certain types of people will stick with the game and naturally have more motivation to learn!

Yes, but … when we look at these “certain types of people”, we can distinguish again between sub-types … and anyway:

“There are two types of people: one type distinguishes between two types of people.” (no idea who said this)

I also would add though that a bad first learning experience can really kill the potential for a person to be interested in the game. I have had much more success teaching Go with the help of interactive presentations than without them. In the right contexts they can be very effective.

I agree. I teach Go to children and youths at the local school, and also to adults, and whatever is a nice edutaining diversion to me talking or us/them playing on the board has always been helpful (most notably doing Tsumego with EasyGo on my iPad). I think the time is over when Go only was for uptight and overly serious people. HnG showed that Go can become POPular, let’s put back the POP in Go!

Another reason why I believe that this is the right direction is the fact that more and more people are used to fast switching (others say this is attention deficit, but it may be an adequate adaptation to a changing world … chicken vs. egg), and so using all possible new kinds of media seems to be a good thing to me, using as many input channels as possible.

Of course, we are not out to spread Go like it is the gospel

Uhm …

but I think having good resources at hand can really help us to interest the people we want to reach.

This. SO MUCH this!

Like in my case, I've thought many times that it'd be nice to have a good website to guide club members through ladders, nets, and other simple concepts without making the experience feel like homework.

Multi-language, please, like The Interactive Way To Go

I’d love to see whatever you’re going to come up with, I already like the images you posted.


Greetings, Tom

[EdLee]

Hi Hayang, your designs are very pretty! Thanks!

[Boidhre]

That green is a terrible choice of background colour. I would find that text extremely hard to read. I do agree that many of the Western UIs are very 90s, KGS looks like something I'd have messed with 10-15 years ago. I don't care personally but I've met younger people who were a bit surprised by the lack of context menus and similar.

[often]

typically people who like playing go only like playing go, haha
this might be one of those situations where the response you'll typically it get is "that -is- a great idea, you should do it!"


honestly, i think the spread of Go is mostly hampered by the difficulty of Go, how long a "real" 19x19 game would take for most beginners, and it also takes awhile before someone can really understand the "depth" of Go.

[Hayang]

typically people who like playing go only like playing go, haha
this might be one of those situations where the response you'll typically it get is "that -is- a great idea, you should do it!"


honestly, i think the spread of Go is mostly hampered by the difficulty of Go, how long a "real" 19x19 game would take for most beginners, and it also takes awhile before someone can really understand the "depth" of Go.

That's true, and I certainly see where you're coming from, but I want to add this:

At a place like my university, the spread of Go is almost completely dependent on whether or not people are introduced to it, and whether or not people are introduced to it well. It's obvious that people either will or will not want to learn the game, but how you present it impacts how interested they become after the 10 minutes they invest into learning the basics.

If you look at it one way, Go is indeed one of the hardest games. It's amazingly complex, and to hold your own against an experienced player is almost impossible when you start out.

However, if Go is "hard", it is also "easy". The rules are easy and even the 6-year-old I babysat learned to play Go in 10 minutes, and he even watched a professional game with me and noted things like "oh, these only have one breathing space" and "that group is getting surrounded". The newcomers in our club progress to only 15k strength, but it's not like they are not enjoying Go (they are). I say this because the attitude that Go is "easy to learn and deep enough to keep you learning for centuries" is attractive to newcomers and keeps them more interested than the attitude that "Go seems easy but is really hard". It's an arbitrary distinction that the people who introduce the game can influence, and good introductions change whether new players see the game as fun and worth trying out or not. Whether they are "the kind of person who plays go" comes afterward.

...Which is why I advocate things that make the initial learning experience more accessible, intuitive, and fun.

[Hayang]

That green is a terrible choice of background colour. I would find that text extremely hard to read. I do agree that many of the Western UIs are very 90s, KGS looks like something I'd have messed with 10-15 years ago. I don't care personally but I've met younger people who were a bit surprised by the lack of context menus and similar.

Hey Boidhre, do you think the white on light green is hard to read? I'll consider that when I revise them. The text is big and I don't use this on a projector so legibility hasn't seemed too much a problem to me, but I can see how it might be straining.

[Boidhre]

That green is a terrible choice of background colour. I would find that text extremely hard to read. I do agree that many of the Western UIs are very 90s, KGS looks like something I'd have messed with 10-15 years ago. I don't care personally but I've met younger people who were a bit surprised by the lack of context menus and similar.

Hey Boidhre, do you think the white on light green is hard to read? I'll consider that when I revise them. The text is big and I don't use this on a projector so legibility hasn't seemed too much a problem to me, but I can see how it might be straining.

The white text is perfectly readable. The black text is extremely hard to read even though text that size isn't generally for me. There's insufficient contrast between the black text and the background.

[Bantari]

I agree with Dr.Straw on this.

Making things pretty is nice and good, but I rather put effort into better content and better services. There is tons of stuff out there which is extremely popular/usable but with function takes the front sit to form. For example - Google. Or, if we look for examples in design/developer realms, things like Stack-Overflow, Github, List Apart, W3Schools, just to name a few of the prominent ones. Never heard that Github's design "severely hampers" programmer productivity, or that List Apart would be read by more people if the interface was more glossy.

We have recently had a failed experiment with "pretty" - called Kaya.go - and it seems that functional trumps pretty, so this is what I would put my energies into.

Another experiment - the new panda client - will be interesting to observe. Will the pretty interface translate into upsurge of usership? I doubt it, but I was wrong before.

On the other hand, pretty looks cannot really hurt by themselves. But lack of them "severely hampering spread of Go"? This, I think, is severely not true. There are so many other things much more important than pretty looks which influence the spread of Go (or lack thereof) - I am not sure pretty even makes it on the list, and if it does it sits right-smack at the bottom.

Still, as I said, pretty cannot hurt, so if somebody has time and needs a hobby and does not think they have anything better to contribute - prettify away! But for all the good intentions, I think the original article was slightly (highly?) dabbing in sensationalism just for the sake of it. And this, in my eyes, undermined otherwise interesting message.

PS>
No offense.

[Hayang]

This is 100% pixel ratio:

[Monadology]

EDIT: Sorry for being grumpy.

It seems to me that someone is trying to do something productive and helpful here, I'm just a little frustrated by some of the negativity.