Complaints about new (December 2013) interface design

Question

Eight hours ago, the top stripe of the Super User window showed my name.  When I hovered the mouse over my name, a convenient information/control box popped up:

                               

(although I don’t know what it was counting for revisions; I do a lot of editing).

Sometime during the past eight hours the design changed.  Now, the top stripe shows my gravatar/icon instead of my name.  That, by itself, is a don’t-care.  But when I hover over it, all it shows me is my name:

                               

What’s the point in that?  And by the way, hovering over the reputation produces an even more pointless text:

                               

OK, I found a clickable button over to the left that pops up an information box that lists recent reputation change events.

I don’t like this.

• As I stated, this new box requires a click to invoke and a click to dismiss, making it more work than the previous one.
• This new box is showing me information I can already get from the reputation tab of my user page.
• I don’t see the nice day / week / month / votes / revisions / favorites summary information that was there.
• I don’t see the activity, privileges, and log out links that were there.
• The chat and meta links seem to be gone, too.

To add insult to injury, I’m finding the gray-on-black text to be harder to read than what we had before, but I guess that’s subjective and anecdotal.

Can we please have the old design back?  Barring that, can the above issues be resolved?

Oh, I guess you need to know that I’m using Internet Explorer 8.

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And yes, I know I’m not supposed to post two questions as one.  But why isn’t ui a synonym for user-interface, as it is on the main site?

Answer 1

I'll try and address your issues individually here:

As I stated, this new box requires a click to invoke and a click to dismiss, making it more work than the previous one.

This is intentional, the hover behavior was not intuitive. We do however enable hovering once you click to open any of the buttons on the left, since you have declared your intent.

This new box is showing me information I can already get from the reputation tab of my user page.

The achievements box is from across the network. It is immediately updated, contains events from all sites, and includes badges - none of these are true of the reputation tab.

I don’t see the nice day / week / month / votes / revisions / favorites summary information that was there.

True, these were used by very few users and were not retained. We can't please everyone with every change we make.

I don’t see the activity, privileges, and log out links that were there. The chat and meta links seem to be gone, too.

Chat and logout at in the site switcher on the left. Activity was removed. Privileges is available from the help center on the right.