Help testing redesigned mobile menus on AstroBin

AstroBin
AstroBin Beta Testers •7 replies•88 views
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Salvatore Iovene avatar
Salvatore Iovene avatar

Hello members of the AstroBin Beta Testers group!

I’ve redesigned the mobile menus on AstroBin, and I’d love your help testing them!

Why I made this change:

  • To improve the overall user experience on mobile

  • To make the most common actions easier to reach with fewer taps

  • To make the menus more consistent across different sections of the site

  • To prepare for the future native app version of AstroBin

I’ve attached before/after screenshots for reference, at the bottom of the post.

Please use this special link to test: https://beta-app.astrobin.com/

Feel free to login and use the site on mobile.

PS: you can also use “Add to home screen” on your phone and you get a version with a bottom navigation bar, and uses all vertical space available.

⚠️ Important: This link uses the real live AstroBin database — it’s not a staging site. Please don’t delete or modify anything you wouldn’t on the live site. This test is only about the mobile menus and some UI tweaks.

What I’d like to know from you:

  • If anything looks broken or wrong

  • If anything became harder to find or use compared to before (be objective please, “I'm used to the old way” doesn't mean the old way is better)

  • Any suggestions or feedback about the new layout

Your feedback is critical before I roll this out to everyone.

Thanks for helping make AstroBin better!

Salvatore

📷 Screenshot 2025-09-11 at 15.58.17.jpgScreenshot 2025-09-11 at 15.58.17.jpg📷 Screenshot 2025-09-11 at 16.03.57.jpgScreenshot 2025-09-11 at 16.03.57.jpg📷 Screenshot 2025-09-11 at 15.56.47.jpgScreenshot 2025-09-11 at 15.56.47.jpg📷 Screenshot 2025-09-11 at 16.00.19.jpgScreenshot 2025-09-11 at 16.00.19.jpg📷 Screenshot 2025-09-11 at 16.01.49.jpgScreenshot 2025-09-11 at 16.01.49.jpg

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petelaa avatar
petelaa avatar

Mostly improvements imo, 👍🙏!

Love the dedication!

Two minor points, though both are not strictly related to this upgrade:

  1. I see a lot of little dots now on an image page. Circled them on the screenshot below. Some of these even have just one item under the dots - surely it would be cleaner for instance to replace the last one (next to the user name) by a 💬 emoji directly?📷 IMG_3701.jpegIMG_3701.jpeg

  2. I think in the old days, I used to see the IotD on the home screen, and the image feed directly below. Now there’s the forum there which I (no disrespect) am not interested in at all. I’m just here for the pretty pictures.

    I found it difficult to navigate to the image feed in the new menu structure, actually spent way too much time inside all the menus, before I realised I should just have scrolled down.

    I’m not sure what my suggestion would be. And maybe I’m just stupid for not scrolling down and there is nothing you would need to change. I would appreciate the option to customise my Home Screen and remove the forum. But this probably has little to do with the functionality you are asking feedback for right now.

Oh and I really like the new buttons in the full screen mode!

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Salvatore Iovene avatar
Salvatore Iovene avatar

petelaa · Sep 12, 2025, 01:05 PM

I see a lot of little dots now on an image page. Circled them on the screenshot below. Some of these even have just one item under the dots - surely it would be cleaner for instance to replace the last one (next to the user name) by a 💬 emoji directly?

Thanks, good point! Yes, that's really too many kebab menus! The last one can be replaced directly with the message icon, thank you!

The others, I'm not sure how to solve it. I think moving everything from the horizontal one on the image to the vertical one in the header is probably not a good idea. One refers to the image's page as an object, the other to the image as an image. When it's not your image, that's only for the classic view, and it will not be there when it's a native app or an “add to home screen” app.

What do you think?

petelaa · Sep 12, 2025, 01:05 PM

I think in the old days, I used to see the IotD on the home screen, and the image feed directly below. Now there’s the forum there which I (no disrespect) am not interested in at all. I’m just here for the pretty pictures.

In the future native app and in the “add to home screen” mode, the forum is gone from the home page, because there's a button on the footer. But for the regular mobile view, I didn't want to make it so different.

It's a good idea to make the forum's present user controlled, or just show a really compact version on mobile, so that the recent images are not below the fold. I'll look into this!

Salvatore Iovene avatar
Salvatore Iovene avatar

I can make the message button not need a menu, obviously, and change the style of the revisions indicator so it doesn't look like the other menus. I think this helps.

We're left with the two top menus.

📷 Screenshot 2025-09-12 at 15.46.59.jpgScreenshot 2025-09-12 at 15.46.59.jpgI would say that on desktop this is less of a problem because they are far from each other, but I can see how that can be cluttering. I don't have a nice solution because:

  1. When it's not your image, that menu is almost never there, except when the photographer allows downloading the image.

  2. When it's your image, merging the two menus would make it too many entries, and anyway the horizontal one needs to be on top of the image because it has image related actions (moon scale, annotations, measurements, map, …)

We probably have to live with two menus, but how do we make it look good?

John59 avatar
John59 avatar

Tried the “Move to home screen” and it is a great feature.

This really makes the use of a smartphone/tablet so much user friendly.

I spend so much of my day constantly checking Astrobin for messages, forum feedback, and newly added photos. Being able to use the smartphone (Samsung S24 Ultra) makes me much less dependent on a PC and I can check anytime and anywhere.

Other than what was mentioned by Petelaa I have not found any issues.

This is great!

Salvatore Iovene avatar
Salvatore Iovene avatar

Changing the icon from “yet another ellipsis menu” to a toolbox seems to help, don't you think? Now there's only one ellipsis menu!

📷 Screenshot 2025-09-12 at 16.57.30.jpgScreenshot 2025-09-12 at 16.57.30.jpg

petelaa avatar
petelaa avatar

Yeah, like the toolbox icon instead of the ellipses!!

With regards to the button for the revisions, I’m not so sure. Obviously I’ve now been looking at it quite a lot, so I’m missing that “new viewers” ability. But I feel that neither is really intuitive. In the sense that without clicking it, you’d have no idea what’s under the button, and also the revisions are something you don’t go searching for out of the blue, as most images don’t have it.

On the other hand, I completely agree with you that this is probably not something that’s solvable. And given that, you might be better off with the old way, the horizontal ellipses. There’s enough difference with the vertical ellipses to not be weird, especially since the other two instances are now resolved. And by using a similar (but not the same) icon as elsewhere on the screen, you’d achieve uniformity, which is generally more pleasing than a really different icon.

Salvatore Iovene avatar
Salvatore Iovene avatar

Thank you everyone for testing!

I need to temporarily take this away from you until I make it available to everyone over the next few days.

Thanks for understanding!

Salvatore

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