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Edited by aboniks:
10/15/2014 4:52:31 PM
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Honest Feedback on: Bungie.net - For the new User Experience designer...
UPDATE: [quote]If you have any particular suggestions for the app or the website, or bugs to report, feel free to make a thread in #Help then :)
~[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/73175643/0/0/0]Hylebos [/url](Mentor)[/quote]
TL;DR - If you're not the new User Experience designer for Bungie.net, feel free to keep right on stepping (or, better yet, add something constructive to the relevant section of this feedback), you won't be missing anything you don't already know.
[quote][b]I had a good conversation with the Bungie.net team this week about that very topic. They have a new User Experience designer who really knows his stuff[/b]. ~[url=http://www.bungie.net/7_Bungie-Weekly-Update---10102014/en/News/News?aid=12272]Deej[/url] [/quote]
[i]Dear new B.net User Experience Designer,[/i]
Congratulations on scoring this gig! Welcome to never sleeping again. Just to get you started off with some honest, (occasionally frustrated and blunt) thoughts, from a regular (although not particularly oldschool) bungie.net user with 120+ hours invested in the shooting end of this franchise, here you go...
[b]General interface impressions: [/b]
Too much dead space, both the white kind, and the kind filled with irrelevant (pretty) splash graphics
Site sections are inconsistent, visually. Different designers, obviously. Are the teams running their own sections and making the layout and design choices? Stop it. Looks cheap and confused. You can't afford that.
Leftbar/rightbar/navigation is too busy; less "cool" sliding motif, more cohesion
Sliding graphics on scroll in some sections but not others. Pick one and stick with it (pick not-sliding; for great justice, remove extraneous section header graphics)
Search is hidden behind an overly stylized icon until you stumble on it, and then the mouseover semiotics link it to your messaging system. "What the actual -blam!-?", as Jenna Marbles might say. This has no cool factor and generates confusion.
Stop linking out to different domains without a new tab/window. Amateur hour.
Lack of adaptive mouseover/tooltip data field placement; don't put mouseover data off-screen, ever.
The character-specific game data feels like it was arranged as window dressing by a marketing intern, not by a group of people who actually play the game and want to use this system to interact with their characters and their peers.
Footer might as well be deleted, if you leave it as is; Put that data somewhere else, make it static, but collapsible. No one sees it; they should. (check your click-through stats for footer links, they're abysmal)
Feedback in more detail follows, by section. (As links to sub-posts, because we've got invisible character limits here and I'm not up to playing Sherlock Holmes right now to puzzle out what they are)
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/72542696/0/0/0]News[/url]
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/72543089/0/0/0]Legend[/url]
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/72543701/0/0/0]Tower[/url]
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/72544113/0/0/0]Grimoire[/url]
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/72544493/0/0/0]Clan[/url]
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/72545018/0/0/0]Groups[/url]
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/72545422/0/0/0]Forums[/url]
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/72545813/0/0/0]Help[/url]
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/72546200/0/0/0]About Destiny[/url]
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/72546418/0/0/0]More[/url]
That's pretty much all I've got time for, I just burned about five hours clicking all the buttons, considering, compiling, and writing this up. I hope this is received in the spirit it was intended. [i] I did this on a Saturday, instead of playing Destiny. [/i]
Seriously, good luck in your new job. I hope you've got a thick skin.
Cheers!
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Edited by aboniks: 10/15/2014 4:52:12 PMBumping, because apparently this actually belongs in the Help section. [quote]If you have any particular suggestions for the app or the website, or bugs to report, feel free to make a thread in #Help then. ~[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/73175643/0/0/0]Hylebos[/url] (Mentor)[/quote] [b]So, Bungie.net needs help.[/b]
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1 ReplyEdited by aboniks: 10/11/2014 9:59:17 PM[b]News Section: [/b] Special snowflake layout. More deapspace. "Next Page" navigation is only at the bottom. Don't make friends with whoever did all this, just lock them in a mop closet and go to lunch.
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[b]Groups Section: [/b] More deadspace, placeholder images, giant icons of dubious value, sliding scroll navigation, and special snowflake layout. UGH. Are these clans or groups? Look at the http, look at the page design, look at the topnav, you tell us. What the hell is this page for, where does it fit in the overall scheme of the game? Rightbar, what's going on with all this search stuff? This is neither intuitive, nor explained. [i]Suggested group[/i]s - I'm not in any group/clan larger than 52. Why is this thing suggesting a stack of groups with tens of thousands of people in them that are blatantly centered around consoles I don't own/have connected to my account? Figure out what's going on with this algorithm and get the user research people to figure out how to make it relevant to us, because it isn't. [i]Popular Groups[/i] - It's a matrix of canned art with names tacked on. Great. What are these groups about, why are they popular? Try a list; art/name/membership#'s on the left, clan "about" field on the right. [i]Group spotlight[/i] - Yeah. [i]There isn't one[/i]. For a game that's supposed to be social and promote...you know, let's skip it. If the players and the groups they form are supposed to be important, then show and tell, don't expect us to accept a marketing bulletpoint when the evidence appears contradictory.
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Edited by aboniks: 10/11/2014 10:25:38 PM[b]Help Section: [/b] Don't mess with these people, they're busy. Just lay the meat down outside their office and back away, remaining on your belly, without making any sudden movements. Keep your eyes downcast. Seriously though, this part of the site is almost alright, design-wise. They have a deadspace problem (presumably to keep the page mobile-browser-friendly), big pointless graphics up top, and their interface is utterly different from everything else on the site, but just tidy up the edges a little and let them get on with helping the players. You would do well to take the simplicity of their design and expand on that as needed for the rest of the site. They also deserve an across the board raise, free hourly massages at their desks, stock options, and dancing girls, (and/or dancing boys, as appropriate). Also, if all this design advice falls on deaf ears, shrunken budgets, or tiny time-frames, take advantage of their existing and future help articles to write tooltips for all the stuff that they have to explain about this site that doesn't make any sense.
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Edited by aboniks: 10/12/2014 2:32:37 AM[b]"About Destiny" section:[/b] Oh, snap that's a whole different website. Sure wish that had been in a new browser tab.
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[b]"More" Section:[/b] Why is this even a thing? There's only four items in it, it's not like they don't fit in the leftbar nav. [spoiler]You see the irony here, don't you? Of course you do.[/spoiler]
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Edited by aboniks: 10/11/2014 10:03:58 PM[b]Legend Section:[/b] So many issues. Most of them would require their own feedback posts to explain. But, to start you off: Sliding graphical scroll junk hides/breaks navigation buttons (popup close, etc) if you haven't scrolled far enough down. Stop sliding, Bruv. (Sistah?) No way to compare two characters (different player or same player) in any degree of detail whatsoever. [b]Advisors section doesn't advise worth a damn; [/b] 1. No faction rep display, no faction gear advisors (who has a better thing that you're likely to buy (use my stats, I don't need to be notified if there's a great hand cannon), no faction currency advisors (where do I get the marks and rep, how much do I need to get that thing I want? How do you know which thing I want...you let me tell the system, and you set a flag/cookie) 2. gear advisors don't tell us what/how many materials we need to upgrade our equipped or inspected gear (totals on hand and needed, please)/where to source them 3. closest bonuses section disconnected from it's larger parent section in the grimoire...not even a link, why? 4. Can't turn in or pick up bounties [b]Gear section is weirdly incomplete;[/b] 1. Weapon/armor mouseovers don't include special abilities...that's why we want to look at them. 2. Vaulted weapons/armor have no 3d preview. 3. Items do not display required upgrade materials for available upgrades. 4. Items with either/or upgrade options chan't be set 5. No mouseover data for Light, Defense, Stats 6. No data on gear stat effectiveness (0-100%), no numerical waring of stat overkill 7. Down Arrow navigation to see all our gear slots is utterly ridiculous in this conext. Just let us scroll down the page, don't make us load another frame. This isn't a console, it's a series of tubes. 8. Ships have no stats, why are they hanging half out of the inspection popup? Are they bashful? Put them front and center. Extra points if we can drag-to-center and zoom in/out. 9. Sparrows have no 3d models at all. Wut? [b]Inventory Section;[/b] 1. Materials and Currency have no popups. What are they for, where are they from? 2. Items and currencies have inventory caps, but we can't see that. Show and tell. 3. Items and currencies have specific vendors that accept them, why can't we see that on mouseover, and click to see their current inventory? If I click on my stack of 32,767 strange motes of light, I should get a list of who wants them, and links to the stuff they want to sell me. 4. Why can't players organize these all widgets manually? 5. Why aren't you autosorting these widgets by [insert brilliant criteria suggestion here]? 6. Why can't I abandon a bounty here? 7. Why can't I discard items here?
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2 RepliesEdited by aboniks: 10/12/2014 2:31:38 AM[b]Clan Section: [/b] Make friends with whichever part of the team is in charge of deciding what clans are actually supposed to be/do in this ecosystem, and bring a vision with you when you do it. Make a clan. Seriously, just go through the motions and see how/if it works. Note the fact that they have no presence at all in the game aside from adding one line of text to our emblem graphic, a couple letters to our score cards, and two achievements that aren't visible anywhere other than console sub-menus, Then go ask the designers what you're supposed to do with a clan. (The answer may surprise you.) We have a clan interface that boils down to a roster with no relevant information in it (ie. who is on what console, what time zone, what gamer tag), a private clan sub-forum that is also occasionally public, confusingly segregated admin controls, and the ability to create alliances that have no function whatsoever. We have no clan stats, no clan activity history, no way to compare or compete within the clan or within an alliance, no list of clan achievements, no way to message the whole roster, no way to opt out of the clan "wall" chat stream, no way to make a sticky post that will stay exactly where you put it. In short, the clan interface experience truly blows, both for administrators and for regular members . There's a gigantic disconnect between the information that your teams are collecting, and what you're showing us. We want to see how we're doing, and how our friends are doing, even more than your game-balance committee does.
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1 ReplyEdited by aboniks: 10/12/2014 2:27:51 PM[b]Tower Section: [/b] 0. This entire section is a pointless artwank if we can't interact with the vendors. 1. Knock off the overlapping background images. No benefit/much browser overhead. 2. Find out why clicking on dead space in the map opens up random vendors, and make it stop. 3. Why does the rightbar pop up on the tower map when there's nothing in it? Stahp. 4. Shrink this map to fit standard screen resolutions. Query my browser, and shrink to fit. Having to drag-scroll is annoying, since most of this page is void of content and filled with fluff map graphics. There's only 19 things to click on, I should be able to see them all at once. If not shrink, let us zoom in/out, and set a zoom% cookie . 5. Why can't I just look at my vault without going back to the gear section and having to fiddle around with stuff in the rightbar? Give us a real vault popup here, and let us organize it, let us store, retrieve, equip, unequip, discard, dismantle. Space-magic should give us access to our equipment anywhere. We can already carry star-ships in our pockets and transmat living creatures.
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1 ReplyEdited by aboniks: 10/12/2014 3:59:56 AM[b]Grimoire Section:[/b] Oh god...[i]The Horror. [/i] Make friends with the folks who handle player statistic tracking/display for the Grimoire. Then make friends with whoever is in charge of deciding when we should get bonuses, and how we should be made aware of them. Then get those people drunk and chatty and lock them in a room with Deej right before the weekly update. From the player side of things, we're watching the stats and bonuses that our characters are earning slowly vanish from that part of B.net without any explanation. If that weren't bad enough, we're frequently seeing broken game/grimoire interfaces while we play, with new grimoire unlocks timing out before the specifics can be retrieved and shown to us. We unlocked something...yay, what was it? Are they being purged from the database to save space? Did we offend the gods? Is it work in progress? Half of the bonuses don't even appear to work, and the web UI is completed unintegrated with the game UI. That experience sucks salty balls. The recent redesign of that section was an astonighshly nice surprise, from a standalone interface/visual perspective, but if it continues to be drained of relevant data, the number of people who bother dropping in to look at the improved interface, larger art, and totally decontextualized lore will be shrinking, rather than climbing. If the beer doesn't work, buy those design folks a spliff and get them to either communicate with us, or put the breaks on lobotomizing our Grimoire statistics. There are [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/71076794/0/0]entire threads-worth[/url] of criticism and [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/71906717/0/0]integration solution proposals[/url] for this particular part of the game/forum/app/mess. It needs serious server and client integration work, (Jumpin' Jezebel,[i] at least[/i] let us read the story cards in orbit or something, and track the stuff you say you're tracking) hard choices, prolonged attention, and most importantly communication. If we didn't already know it was supposed to be there, you could delete it completely and no one would notice any difference in the overall user experience, with the sole exception being that people on reddit/youtube/the forum would stop holding the Grimoire up as exhibit A in the corporate story-killing conspiracy theory kangaroo court. (The spliff can wait until after your first employee evaluation.) Please don't just take this part of the world off life support and hope for the best. Make it [b]breathe[/b].
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1 ReplyEdited by aboniks: 10/12/2014 6:51:47 PM[i]I dated a phrenologist once. She loved my bumps...[/i]
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2 RepliesBring back titles.
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2 RepliesEdited by aboniks: 10/12/2014 2:41:12 PM[b]Forums section:[/b] [u]Delete the forums immediately; save yourself.[/u] (Only 98% joking) 0. Why in the name of almighty [insert thing here] can't we easily "see all posts by User X"? This is basic forum functionality we're talking about. 1. [b]"Bungie Replied"[/b] Great. Nice touch. What we actually need is [b]"Seen by Bungie"[/b], especially in the feedback forum. We don't need your replies, (although we enjoy getting them). We need to know someone is paying attention; we also know (hope) that you have better things to do that chat with us. Right now the replies are so few and far between, on such random topics, that those labels can actually be counter-productive. 2. Moar Sliding scroll images, deadspace, nix that. 3. Code of Conduct link; This is literally the [i]only time[/i] I will ever suggest using a "Blink" html markup tag on the public-facing internet, if browsers even still parse them. 4. Suggested tags; Completely irrelevant at present. Don't suggest tags until there's a finished post to suggest them for. Make tag suggestions context sensitive; check the post we've written for keywords and THEN suggest tags. If I'm writing a post about Titans, suggesting a Raid/Patch/Wombat tag to me is not only silly, it runs the risk that I will actually take the advice and tag my post with the wrong tags. Alternatively, if suggesting appropriate tags is too much work, stop suggesting them altogether. On the off chance that you're suggesting tags to us because that's what you want feedback on at a particular time, then for the sake of Vishnus Light-Blue Toes, [i]tell us[/i] that's what's going on. 5. Threads in which people I am following have left a comment should be highlighted, and those posts should be no more than two clicks away, not require me to scroll through 9001 comments to [i]maybe[/i] find them if they're not buried in a sub-thread. Auto-expand subthreads that have followed members participating in them. 6. Give us a tooltip for the like/dislike percentages that are displayed at the far right of each thread link. It took me a month to even notice them, and then a few hours for it to dawn on me what they hell they were supposed to convey. 7. "Sort by" make these choices persistent, I shouldn't have to reset them constantly. 8. "Sort by: Favorites" How do I set a favorite? More importantly, why do I have to ask you how this works? 9. "Questions" and "Answered Questions". Really? There's an icon that distinguishes them already. Pointless distinction. 10. "Follow #Feedback" Following tags...Does this do anything at all? How does it work? If there's no answer, get rid of it.
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1 ReplyGreat post, aboniks. It's excellent to see someone find the time and offer thorough and fair feedback. Thank you for sharing. I definitely like that, "Seen by Bungie" instead of "Replied to by Bungie."
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3 RepliesProfile pages don't always even show the user's characters Complete lack of the possibility of finding all posts or even topics created by a specific user These two came to mind for now, no idea if you've listed them somewhere already
