What's Wrong With WinCustomize?

Yes, we want your complaints!

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 by Zoomba | Discussion: WinCustomize News

This March, WinCustomize turns 7.  For seven years the site has grown in terms of visitors, bandwidth, quantity of skins etc.  And the site itself has gone through several revisions in that period.  Today, we're on the 5th iteration of WinCustomize, and on the whole it still bears a striking resemblance to that first site launched back in 2001.  For good or ill, a lot of the decisions that went into that first site determine direction to this day.

While there have been a lot of improvements, there are probably a lot of places where we've failed to meet expectations.  WinCustomize 2007 was focused on a solid foundation, code that was stable and expandable.  Now we're in a position to focus on the UI and the presentation more, to improve the user experience dramatically.  This is where you come in.

About a year ago, we sought your opinions on how Stardock had failed the community.  Your comments on what you felt we could be doing better has helped us make a lot of changes and improvements to our products.  Well, we want to try that again, only this time specifically with WinCustomize.  We want to know what doesn't work, what sucks, what you hate, what you want fixed about WinCustomize.  We are looking for very specific critiques of the site, it's functionality, layout, user interface etc.

This thread is about critiques, it's not about defending the site, it's not about telling us how much you like the site.  If we are going to improve the site in the future, we need a very clear picture of what is broken and needs to be fixed.

A week from today, I will be going through the comments on this thread and compiling a master list of complaints and critiques.  We will use this list when we start the requirements and design work for the next WC update later this year.

151 Reply 22 Referrals
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bobbyhundreds
Reply #81 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:01 AM
Cool 2of3,it's always a relief to know it's not just me.    

HG_Eliminator
Reply #82 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:08 AM
Cool 2of3,it's always a relief to know it's not just me.



It's not just you 2 either I hate IE but have to reload it when ever I wanna mess with my Photo library..bla......


bobbyhundreds
Reply #83 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:14 AM
Weird isn't it? I can't get a single picture uploaded. (   

mitche323
Reply #84 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:26 AM
In searching for wallpapers, at deviant art they have a descriptive search. You can search for "water, sunset" and get all wallpapers that have water and a sunset. Or search for 'trees' and you get wallpapers with trees. They also have groups of wallpapers - fantasy, landscapes, etc. etc.

ZubaZ
Reply #85 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:36 AM
In searching for wallpapers, at deviant art they have a descriptive search. You can search for "water, sunset" and get all wallpapers that have water and a sunset. Or search for 'trees' and you get wallpapers with trees. They also have groups of wallpapers - fantasy, landscapes, etc. etc.
WC has that too.  The search looks at title, author, description and tags.

mitche323
Reply #86 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:52 AM
Sorry my bad - I found it - you are correct.

c242
Reply #87 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:54 AM
I never could get 'warm' with the forum-system here.

Just use InvisionBoard for the Forums would be an option for me. Much less confusing and more organized than it is now. I never got why SD tried to re-invent the wheel by doing it's own thing with the forums and spoiling resources for that matter. And it can handle masses of users, see Neowin.

bobbyhundreds
Reply #88 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 10:13 AM
I would love to see a gallery for widescreen wallpapers.  

Zoomba
Reply #89 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 10:14 AM
I just want to clarify something about this thread as we near the 100 post mark.  Here is the sort of stuff I am looking for:
  1. Feature X does not work at all
  2. Feature Y does not work well
  3. Feature Z is stupid, get rid of it
  4. This UI bit is hard to use.
  5. That UI bit isn't well explained
  6. This piece needs to be moved
  7. That section needs to be rearranged/presented differently
  8. I absolutely hate <insert site aspect here>
  9. **** really sucks
  10. The colors hurt my eyes!

I am NOT looking for the following items.  There have been a ton of these in the thread and they will be ignored when I do the round up:
  1. The site really needs to add X (new button, new feature, new page etc.)
  2. Anything related to Stardock Application support.
  3. Anything related to moderation
  4. Anything that is not a technical feature of the site.
This thread is about what you do not like about the site AS IT IS.  It is not for asking us to add a pile of features, buttons, widgets etc.  There will be other threads for that in the future.  There are a ton of things we want to add, there are a ton of things you want to add, but before we start thinking about those we have to refine and fix what's already here. 

Step 1 is to look at what you have.
Step 2 is to figure out what works, what doesn't
Step 3 is to cut what should be cut, fix what should be fixed
Step 4 is to start looking for what to add new.

We almost always jump straight to "lets add stuff!" step, and never go back to fix what's broken.  With the next update to WinCustomize, we want to get away from that.

bobbyhundreds
Reply #90 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 10:22 AM
OK then...I don't like that the site does not have a ws wp gallery.    

ZubaZ
Reply #91 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 10:27 AM
Zoomba . . I'd be interested in what your first pass at culling this thread gets and having the oppertunity to revise or clarify.

For example, the current "skinning" available is to move the sidebar to teh left or right.  Is "Allow skinning of WC" a new feature or a #9 or #10 on your list?

Is my suggestion that navigation needs improvement and consistancy a new feature or a #4?

Being able to open the "next" page in the forums as a new tab a new feature or #8 that I can't?

Zoomba
Reply #92 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 10:50 AM

"Make the site skinnable" is a new feature.  It doesn't exist as it stands. 

"Next page in new tab" is also a new feature.

"improvements and consistency in navigation" is a critique of the current system.  You're saying it currently sucks, it needs to be cleared up, made consistent etc.

If there's interest, I will post the condensed list gleaned from this thread next week.


ZubaZ
Reply #93 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 10:56 AM
"Next page in new tab" is also a new feature.
Open a link in new tab is a feature of FF and IE.  The fact that you can't do it in WC might be a feature I guess.  

Consider me interested. 

RomanDA
Reply #94 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:01 AM
There should be separate DX Objects, Widgets,Gadgets and Stand Alone galleries



RogueRabbit
Reply #95 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:05 AM
When using Opera Browser to view the home page the following occurs:
When you move your mouse cursor over the element bars "Today's favourites" and "Top Master skins" the pictures showing the application icons moves up a bit. Doing this repeatedly will result in the icons moving off the screen at the top.

Looks really funny but I reckon it's not meant to be that dynamic.

angus1949
Reply #96 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:42 AM
Well, my 2 main things are the rating stars needs moved and I'd like to see the search less exacting. More like Google. Asking "do you mean" or pulling up results for partial names. Sorry if I've duplicated.

KenzieZero
Reply #97 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 2:24 PM
Please fix the RSS feed, it renders as a two-line borked summary for each item, publish a properly-formatted, full content feed.

HoustonRon
Reply #98 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 3:03 PM
Items removed as they're not related to the site.

Not enough "how to do" instructions; i.e. docks.

2of3
Reply #99 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 3:15 PM
Eh Ronald....

This is a site features discussion, not a Stardock software issues thread

NightTrainthedark
Reply #100 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 3:56 PM
Sorry bout the off topic response(S).

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