Why is the new Unity Learn page so terrible?

Agree..learning how to move around in Unity and do simple things with the interface...best way is videos. I would even say that learning 3d modeling is best on video as you can follow along.

Design, story creation, world building, math, business practices, copyright information, networking, and many more...I would go to a book or at the very least written documentation.

 

Modelling is a good example of the dubiousness of Learn. Anyone with a modeling background will immediately understand Unity's 3D view. A newbie might see Unity, find out it uses models you make, learn a little blender, then be in the same boat -- they won't need any help at all with navigation in Unity.

For the rest of the novices, pictures are pretty good, and much easier to create (which matters even more as new versions change the controls). People who really want a video could be directed to the ones for Max and blender. That gets you the concept, which is 95%. Re-doing those videos for Unity's seems hardly worth the effort. And isn't there one on Coursera or somewhere, anyway?

Sure, novices are coming to the Unity site and asking how to learn all these non-Unity skills. For their own sake ("help, Unity requires a PNG but doesn't say how to make one!"), Unity should be emphasizing that these are separately learnable skills. Anything else seems like a lot of duplication.

 

I never said that modeling tutorials should be part of Unity Learn. Unity Learn is for learning how to use Unity, not outside software. I am not sure how that statement was so misunderstood.

What I said is that modeling is an example of something that is better learned with a video tutorial so one can work along with the video.

Modeling and many other things are outside of Unity and there are plenty of resources for those.

 

See the earlier conversation about one of Unity's strengths being its accessibility to newcomers. I agree that Unity shouldn't be trying to provide tutorials for Blender and GIMP and so on, but there are things I think they could do to help keep people in the Unity ecosystem as much as possible.

For instance, in addition to Unity-specific stuff they could also have a repository of general game dev info. Then, for instance, when someone doesn't know how to make a PNG there could be a link to a page on image formats which could have appropriate information. This would be a win-win, as it'd lower some barriers of entry to newbies while also providing learning materials from people who should know what they're talking about.

 

I really like this idea. I can think of so many simple things that might help....tutorials on terrains could have a link to a page that describes using roughness in the metallic alpha. A link to the manual page that talks about this would be useful as well as a suggestion to use Gimp or PS. I will have to start writing down some of the Unity issues the guys have on the Atavism Discord with what we see as simple Unity tasks.

I send links to the manual first, then tutorials if they are needed. Sometimes it is just a..aha, now I understand that. Other times it is an hour long session to help the figure out how to put texture layers on the terrain and where to find these textures.

 

THIS ^^^^

Sometimes you just want to find that thing in that minute in that video you know is there, as reference, later and quickly. Well, was there...

 

This link has been a life saver. For example, I was looking for this exact tutorial https://web.archive.org/web/2017103...orials/topics/scripting/events?playlist=17117.

However, I can't find the video on YouTube anymore either. I am afraid they must have taken it down.

 

Stumbling back onto the Unity forums due to a different source of frustration I was amused to see that my frustration with the learn page had lived on. Sadly, ~9 months later the learn page is still barely usable garbage. Maybe someone of importance at Unity will see this thread one day..

The whole point of this thread was that they already had a great easy to navigate learn page which for some reason got replaced with this nonsense list that just has all the tutorials in small chunks listed on it without any order to it and the search somehow being utterly useless to help combing through them. There doesn't even exist a list where each related tutorial is bundled together. Or any sort of order which tutorial in a set goes first. It's just pure chaos.

EDIT: I noticed that weirdly enough things have gotten worse in a way. I couldn't even find an easy straight link to the https://learn.unity.com/ page itself but instead you have to go through this new "Learning" page at the top bar and then click something to find the actual tutorials. Maybe Unity noticed that the page was garbage and tried to hide it?

 

I tried to find a tutorial using their search bar and couldn't find it. Even tried to google it. Only way I could find it was in my accounts previously watched tutorials. Cant believe they want people to pay for this with premium learn.

 

The thing that I don't get is Unity doesn't have such an incredible amount of videos that it warrants this and even if it did have that many videos, all this new website does obfuscates them to no end, because of the unorganized and random nature of adding tags, instead of categories containing all, the random results thrown about across many areas and the dreaded, "Load More" button... I've remembered now just how much I hate seeing that button anywhere on the Internet...

It actually makes me wonder if this was done on purpose? I don't know if you can make such a horrific website design by accident.

 

Ok Unity Learn became officially useless. We need a button to switch back to the old design.

Are there software engineers who look at that thing? Or people?
https://learn.unity.com/

Would you like a specification like this?
This is truly discouraging, and if there was one thing that made Unity great, was its learning section, tutors, and ease of learning.
I could so much see this is coming way back when they started to remove code examples from the docs.

And now...

Now look at this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190110133003/https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials

Could a UX designer tell me how am I supposed to use this thing?
Mobile first? Have you ever tried to follow a coding tutorial on your phone?

Im using the wayback machine to look up the things, this is ridiculous.

Everything is over-engineered for no good reason, and eventually became useless.
Im using Unity since 2.5 but Im seriously considering abandoning it.

 

Wait, you've been using Unity for 10 years and you're still using the Learn section? For what? New stuff is in the manual and hopefully you know the old stuff. I agree it's ugly now, but IMHO the real problem was always the content.

 

There's always more to learn, even after years!

It seems like in their quest to 'improve' and gamify the learning portal (with xp, progress bars, etc), they've taken away one of the main useful aspects: the ability to just see every single tutorial and tutorial category at a glance (like in the old page @hofcsaba linked). It makes it much harder to know how much content there actually is now. Granted I don't use Unity learn much anymore and will tend to just google/ youtube whatever issue I'm having trouble with at a given moment, it was a good resource for really deep dive into all of Unity's functionality and learn about techniques you wouldn't have thought of and features you didn't even know Unity had!

It's not that I hate the new Learn page, I just personally always opt for a non-curated experience, I like to choose for myself what content is important.

 

I have to agree - the new (new) page is really difficult to navigate.
The old tutorial / learn pages from 5~ years back were way better. Please keep it simple.

People already made great points in previous posts but here is one more example:

4k resolution - 32" monitor. I cropped 50% of the screen (left and right sides) of useless black background.
On a 32" 4k monitor I can only see TWO cards for tutorials and even those two cards only use like 40% of the allotted space.

Why is the search bar for "What do you want to learn?" so large? If it's meant to be important and encourage users to use the search then why is the font color almost invisible?

 

Yeah, agreed.

I watched a lot of Unity learn content for the first year or two. But it soon becomes faster to read the manual. Mostly I use the learn section these days to get beginners started.

 

Eh, there are legit uses even for old timers. There are aspects of Unity I don't really use a lot, or there are things that are new that I haven't used yet. Docs for the new stuff are very incomplete.

 

"You will be metastasized"- The Borg speaking about unity in the galaxy.

 

I just wanted to make a similiar post. I hate the new design. The old website was slow in response time but at least you could find what you were looking for. Now it's both slow AND unorganized.

Instead of learning to use unity I am now learning how to use the website. OOF

EDIT: Oh nice, I am now also leveling up the more progress I make. Usually you would get the satisfaction of completing a lesson by being able to use the stuff you just learned and apply it to your game. Pls fix this Unity!! (You can keep the leveling in but give me the option to use the old Theme)

 

You can still do that.

 

Probably done by people who changed their major from Micronesian basket weaving to graphics arts at the last possible time. Their final thesis was a magazine format sales piece that was large old Helvetica white on a solid black background that read "Buy Some!" and an interactive piece that was a single button that says "Load More" which caused another iteration of ipsum lorem to appear.

 

Of course, but the point I was trying to make is that I don't need a leveling system on a learning site, I need a good learning site.

 

Actually, the site is not that bad. A lot still needs to be done, especially search-wise but the courses and tutorials are quite good. The biggest problem is finding what you need to learn...

 

That is why is so bad. You are unable to see things collectively. Every information is obstructed and hidden, as much as possible. Besides is not desktop friendly whatsoever.

The learn site is not suppose to be freaking game to play.
Seriously, page design is disrespectful toward new developers, who want to learn something.

 

I trust the site will not stay like that and they are working on it. I've noticed some changes lately, not that I like them but it's the sign that the site is still in the works.

 

I agree that finding and refinding stuff on there is not very intuitive. I took some time to browse around and saved stuff in browser bookmarks with a folder structure that fits me personally. I do classes every other day, but I haven't opened the start page in months.