Well, some stupid plugin that shall remain nameless crashed my browser three times today, but apart from that it was a nice prank and shows some very promising design ideas. :)
forgive me if some of the wording below is inappropriate or seems demanding/commanding, it's 1 am and I don't want to spend the time improving my tone when I should be improving the message.
Things I like:
- using the avatars is a great idea, being greeted by my doggie just makes me feel welcome. It's amazing how much such a simple addition can change the perception of the site. They're also nice on the "played by.."-text, but probably need to be a bit bigger than that to be useful.
- the permanently available search box is just a consequence of the digg-ripoff, but nevertheless a good addition that should be kept.
- The tour for newbies, why oh why didn't we have one before? Of course that needs to be fleshed out instead of just linking back to the FAQ, but IMHO that'd be a good addition.
Things I really don't like:
- it looks like web 2.0. A soul-less machine, aggregating some kind of content, relying on user-votes to filter out the crap. TASVideos is not one of those sites, there are wips and reviews, submissions, discussions, votes, judging etc, resulting in high quality content. Don't deliver the message that our quality control is based on user votes!
The user votes are an important part of deciding if a movie is worth your time, so I'm all for keeping them, but in the new layout they're the most prominent thing, implying that you should skim over the votes first, then look at the rest of it.
I think the screenshots did a great job of giving a quick hint if a movie is worth your time, especially if you don't know the game. So keep the screenshots. They also deliver the message that someone cared for every single bit of content by hand-picking a screenshot. And they look nice.
- please don't go down the "... (read more)"-path. Cutting descriptions off mid-sentence is the second sign of a soulless machine. The basic assumption that the most vital pieces of information are stored in the first few sentences is fundamentally flawed. If the descriptions need to be shortened to fit the layout, we'll need to reword the descriptions instead of cutting them off.
- cramped front-page. Think about the use-cases:
a) a regular user visits, probably via bookmark. That should be the majority of visits, and they're only interested in the recent additions (a couple of days) as well as quick navigation to wherever they want to go: probably the forums, otherwise the search-box.
b) a semi-regular user visits and wants to catch up with the releases since his last visit. He needs exactly the information as currently present: ~15 recent submission and links to page 2, 3, etc. But remember that this is not a prominent use case.
c) First-time-visitors. Not a prominent use-case either, but still important to cater for. We need to quickly communicate the purpose of the site, instead of clubbing them to death with a wall of text. It's non-trivial to keep the user until he clicks "see the tour", so bring back the one-sentence-description before the tour-link, and tune down on any other content that might distract him from noticing those two important bits.
I think the old FrontPage did a good job of providing exactly that, hinting every user into the right direction and being a starting point for all the different use cases. What you made the new front-page is overkill for almost everyone, IMHO that would be better behind the "more"-link below the Recent Submission box - any user interested in that can still bookmark exactly that page.
- sorting everything by date. Another sign of web 2.0, "keep the cheap content coming, forget about the old stuff." OK for news sites and maybe digg, not ok if you actually try to make old content accessible.
Publication time doesn't really matter on tasvideos, there's no indication that newer movies are radically better than older (non-obsoleted) ones, so sorting by time delivers the wrong message again. I don't think sorting by date has any value outside of "Recent publications" for repeated visitors.
With the ever-growing amount of publications, the biggest hurdle to overcome is to make the content accessible, to give users the means to find what they want without drowning in a flood of information.
To do so, they need a good search engine, meaningful filters and a strong grouping of content. Grouping by system, then alphabet is a good way to find your favourite game of younger days. To prevent the System-pages from growing too much, an additional grouping by game would be nice, but that's probably still not within reach.
Minor things I don't like:
- movie-details. The old page had some coloured backgrounds: you were visually guided to the description first, when you decided to watch the movie you'd quickly find the download-links after that. The new page lacks this kind of visual guidance and I need to actually look for the description. (Of course I'm used to finding the description in the white field, so this point might be less of a problem than I think right now. Still, I think colouring the sections again would be an improvement.)
- Before, there was no information available about the publisher. Now that information is right on the front-page, next to the runner. IMHO the encoders/publishers should be listed somewhere, but less prominently than the runner.
- throw away buzz-words like "upcoming" and "downloads". The most fitting word I know is submissions, and there is no download-section.
- the phrase "played by xxx" is misleading. Maybe fall back to a simple (yet dull) "created by"?
- "submit new". It's rarely used, it should never be used before going through some other pages (FAQ, SubmissionInstructions) and thus really doesn't need a place in the global menu. A link to Helping.html titled "How to contribute" might be more appropriate.
