Website Navigation Update/Testing 2023

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Comments

  • PerttiAPerttiA Posts: 10,024

    When browsing the plugins and tools (for Daz Studio the program), many assets which are props, are listed there.

    https://www.daz3d.com/plugins-and-tools
     

  • csaacsaa Posts: 820

    I tried the new UI with a desktop browser today. I like the pop-out navigation menu!

    The older interface had new web pages load following each click on a navigation item. With all tons of graphical and textual information each page delivers, it takes the mind a few seconds to register the context switch. Remember, our brains are wired to zero in on the human form, particularly the face. So, loading the Shop page, for example, with all its eye candy, breaks the flow. Sometimes the experience can be jarring; tiring even after a while. Now, with the minimalist menu sliding in and out of the left, the change is less taxing. Definitely a step in the right direction.

    If you can accomodate it, add in some Help links to the new menu. Pages such as the Gallery and Shop are fairly long; it's a chore having to scroll down to the bottom to reach the Help section.

    Cheers!

  • SnowSnow Posts: 95

    While you guys are at it could you pretty please add a Show Wishlist Only button?

    I mean how hard can it be? This has already taken way too long. Is that too much to ask? really?

    Thank you!

  • NorthOf45NorthOf45 Posts: 5,485

    daveso said:

    benniewoodell said:

    I feel like there's so many more unnecessary clicks to get to where I want to go. 

    Yes, this.  Why make something more cumbersome for the user?
    I like the list with the categories ... it narrows the search criteria a lot.

    Why doesn;t the site open to the front page? You have to click SHOP ALL to open the front page ... non intuitive. Call it FRONT PAGE or something, but why not just open the site to the front page?  

     Just click "Shop" from the toolbar, you don't need the popup menu with the "Shop All" tile. You'll get the menu at first anyway, but it goes away once at the main shop page. I set my shortcut to daz3d.com/shop to go straight to it. The main company page holds no interest for me.

  • sazzyazzcasazzyazzca Posts: 495

    I have the text version. Initially I liked it, but after a few hours I'm not so fond. 

    Why do I have to hunt around for Help? There should be a link right at the top and also the side menu.

    The cart icon should display exactly how many items are in it, not 9+. When there's a promotion that requires (or is limited to) a certain number of items, I shouldn't have to keep going to my cart to see what the item count is. 

    I liked the orange banner because it was very visible. The bell notification is easy to miss unless you train yourself to keep checking it in case there's a coupon showing up in the middle of the day, as often happens.

    The categories are messed up. For example, I can only access https://www.daz3d.com/plants from my purchase history by going to the store page of an item in that category. The item doesn't show up in any store category from the side menu. There is no Plants category or sub-category in the side menu either.

    The blue ribbon shows:

    3D Models - Places _ Nature _ Plants

    Clicking Plants takes me to the Plants category where I can find the "missing" items. However, clicking Nature takes me to Exteriors and the ribbon then shows:

    3D Models - Environments - Exteriors - Water - Terrain - Landscape

    The "missing" items are nowhere to be found in any of those categories, neither from the blue ribbon nor the side menu.

    It's not across the board though. Some of the items in Plants now show up in the Exteriors category., while others are nowhere to be found. I haven't checked other categories yet, but I think vendors need to check if their products are showing up where they're supposed to.

    I'd like to see  "Other" sub-categories for things that don't really fit into one of the designated sub-categories, rather than tossing an item into a category that's a far stretch as far as relevance goes. Kind of like a junk drawer at home where you put all the stuff that doesn't have a place. At least you know you'll always find it there.

    For example, if I'm looking for whirly dinglehoppers, and the only subcategories are flat dinglehoppers and bent dinglehoppers, don't stuff the whirly one into one of those categories, and don't force me to go through all of the dinglehoppers in the main dinglehopper category to find the whirly one. Put it into the Other category so I can find it easily. This is one thing that seriously agitates me about websites, making me slog through everything when you could just put all the "strays" together in one place so I only have 50 items to look through, rather than 3000. The amount of times I have walked away from a purchase because I got annoyed at the time I was wasting looking for something is very high. 

     

  • PerttiAPerttiA Posts: 10,024
    edited July 2023

    The Pop-up menu is way too aggressive (and big)

    I usually open interesting things in new tabs, and later check out the tabs one by one. Now when I go to select a tab, the Pop-up menu shows up, taking half of the screen and it's not going away without serious effort.

    Post edited by PerttiA on
  • DaremoK3DaremoK3 Posts: 798

    @DAZ_ann0314 :

    Just a follow up to my post yesterday on page 1.

    No issues today with my setup (OS/browser) before logging in, so either they fixed something, or yesterday was just a hiccup with all the Cloudflare errors.

  • DanaTADanaTA Posts: 13,208
    edited July 2023

    csaa said:

     

    If you can accomodate it, add in some Help links to the new menu. Pages such as the Gallery and Shop are fairly long; it's a chore having to scroll down to the bottom to reach the Help section.

    Cheers!

    Not to suggest that the Help link shouldn't be at the top, to be obvious, but...You do know that in the browser, you can simply press the End key to go to the bottom, and the Home key to go to the top?  No scrolling required.   (Unless you're using a phone or table, I guess)

    Post edited by DanaTA on
  • On a scale of 1 to DeviantArt Eclipse, this website redesign is about a 3. I can live with it. Even get used to it!

  • melaniemelanie Posts: 790

    Nope, not a fan of this new design. The text across the top of the screen is way too tiny. I like it the way it was before this change.

  • FirstBastionFirstBastion Posts: 7,760

    You have to click twice now to get anywhere. Used to be one click forum,  one click store.  Sure it looks pretty,  but technically,  those clicks add up. Is the search better now?  that would be something to write about.

  • I'm mainly won over. It's still one click to the main store page to check out today's ads and new stuff, and finally - at last - I can do granular searches. Wanna see poses (and not expressions and animations)? Wanna see land animal figures? Wanna see shoes? And then you can filter and sort by the existing functionality, so if I want to see poses for G8/G8.1 males that are deeply discounted today, well, there you go. No more scrolling through page after page of items, doing Ctrl-F, or scanning icons on 120 squares.per page.

  • ZoZo Posts: 320

    Hi ppl,

    - 500 Internal Server Error when trying  to " Change my pictures" in user profile.               

    The popup menu on the left is boring you need 2 clicks now to go somewhere,

    seen the number of time where i go from my galery, then my cart then the forum then go back to sales home pages again and again it twice the number of click for the same actions than before and it look like web responsive on small screen or smarthone when you have a 27'' it's suprising.

    :)

  • jjoynerjjoyner Posts: 616

    PerttiA said:

    The Pop-up menu is way too aggressive (and big)

    I usually open interesting things in new tabs, and later check out the tabs one by one. Now when I go to select a tab, the Pop-up menu shows up, taking half of the screen and it's not going away without serious effort.

    I agree.  I prefer the text based menu from the left but it only seems to last as long as I am not logged in.  Once I log in, it may last for a short while, depending on where I navigate to, but then the huge picture based menu from the top takes over.

    [Windows 10 laptop, Edge browser] 

  • namffuaknamffuak Posts: 4,145

    If the general purpose is to emphasize categories then right now one or more staff members need to start examining every product in the store and categorize them correctly. Every product must be in at least one category; bundles, of course, will need to be in every category the included products belng to. And this categorization process must, from here on out, be rigorously continued. Failure to have everything properly set up before this goes live will be fatal to the concept.

  • Ki-JenKi-Jen Posts: 64

    First impression (image based version): Somewhat different, but not significantly better or worse.

    But what really annoys me is that big fat "Download Studio" button at the top right. I have no problems with that as long as I am not logged in. Because you can't know if I'm a long-time customer or a newbie who wants to do exactly that: download Studio.

    But that button isn't removed even after login, when you know, who I am. Download Studio? Really? A have a beta and a production release already installed and you know that, because I'm logged in. Please stop to nag me with a "Hey, ever thought about downloading Studio?" when I did that since the beta of the very first release about 20 years ago. Customers, that have an account will have Studio already installed in more than 99% of the time. So, please remove that button, at least after login. It only clutters the interface.

  • kwerkxkwerkx Posts: 105

    Text Based via Safari (on Big Sur).

    Figured out that to go directly to the start page you have to click "shop" on the blue ribbon.. cool.  

    Would like to see "Vendors" on the blue ribbon.  I know I can reach them through the side menu; but, IMO the PAs deserve a hot/direct link to the Vender List and since the blue ribbon feels like hot keys that would be (IMO) a nice place to put it.

     

     

  • ArtAngelArtAngel Posts: 1,689

    joanna said:

    I don't like this so far, because the UI feels less efficient:

    • clicking on "Community" which is fairly into the middle of the screen opens a side bar that forces me to move my mouse way back to the left and figure out more complex menu that doesn't only contain Community submenus but also all the others, so I have to navigate down to the Community again (I've already picked "Community", so why do I get all the options once more?).
    • similarly, clicking on "Store" doesn't bring me to store but instead opens a menu where I can click "shop all" to actually browse the store which means I now need two clicks and more movement across the screen to get to the store's main page instead of one.

    I want to say "I'm sure there are some benefits to the new layout", but so far, I'm failing to see them. Maybe it's the categories, but I gave up on using them as the base for navigation so long time ago, I didn't even bother to check. I might have a look to see if they're less useless (filled with irrelevant items) than they used to be.

    Edited to add: Chrome browser, 24" screen, and I only get the side menu (not that I think that the big picture one would be much better).

    +1. I can't stand it. It really is a poor shopping experience on a desktop.

    Seven193 said:

    On a desktop, and I don't like the sidebar.  It's annoying, doesn't feel natural, feels like I'm getting spammed when it pops up, and adds one more click away from the Shop.

    And the text at the top of the page where is says "Shop Technology Community" is too tiny, compared to before, which was larger and more comfortable to read.  Nope, don't like it.

    Ditto

    barbult said:

    By the way, if you are going to solicit user feedback in the forum, you need a forum that works! I got 4 gateway errors trying to type the simple paragraph above, We can't upload screenshots of problems we see. Even personal messages are failing from time to time now, Sometimes we can't even load the forum to read it, because of network errors. I know that "Daz is aware of the forum problems". but they don't communicate anything about plans to fix the forum. They leave us in the dark as the forum get worse and worse.

    yes

    FirstBastion said:

    You have to click twice now to get anywhere. Used to be one click forum,  one click store.  Sure it looks pretty,  but technically,  those clicks add up. Is the search better now?  that would be something to write about.

    +1.

    Too many clicks feels like the roads are blocked and I'm being forced to take a detour.

  • First and foremost, we should be glad to see that they're trying to improve the site.  The store site has definitely not been a case of "ain't broke, don't fix it".  It's been tolerable, but somewhat annoying and inefficient for many customers.

    I'll add my "+1" to three things already mentioned in the thread:

    1. Having large drop-down or pop-up menus appear when you've unintentionally moved the cursor to certain spots is a little annoying.  Dial it back.

    2. I'm automatically logged in when I visit the site.  No need to have a prominent link/button to download Daz Studio for IP addresses of known Daz accounts.  

    3. Half of the black banner across the top is empty and inert, and if the "Download" button goes away, there would be space for wider link buttons in larger type.

    But the changes are more positive than negative.

  • davesodaveso Posts: 7,000

    DAZ needs to spend some time fixing this forum as well. 

  • doubledeviantdoubledeviant Posts: 1,135
    xyer0 said:

    Search is better. Categorization is much better.

    Core Figures pages have been deleted though. It was nice to be able to audition Genesis 3, 8, & 8.1 Core Figures quickly and easily.

    ETA: the pages are still there, but you have to access them by link now; if you type them in, then you are redirected to daz3d:characters.

    I don't understand why Daz would eliminate a catalog of their flagship products.

    +1. Why is Daz removing useful lists?

    This one is gone now, too:

    https://www.daz3d.com/dinosaurs

    and redirects to:

    https://www.daz3d.com/beasts

    which is a much less focused list - mixing humanoids and animals - and is missing many of the dinosaurs.
  • nomad-ads_8ecd56922enomad-ads_8ecd56922e Posts: 1,949
    edited July 2023

    jjoyner said:

    PerttiA said:

    The Pop-up menu is way too aggressive (and big)

    I usually open interesting things in new tabs, and later check out the tabs one by one. Now when I go to select a tab, the Pop-up menu shows up, taking half of the screen and it's not going away without serious effort.

    I agree.  I prefer the text based menu from the left but it only seems to last as long as I am not logged in.  Once I log in, it may last for a short while, depending on where I navigate to, but then the huge picture based menu from the top takes over.

    [Windows 10 laptop, Edge browser] 

    Yeah, I'm having issues with that giant, obtrusive, low-text, menu panal that's mostly great big pictures that comes up when I mouse past the top of the browser when I pass my mouse over the upper left part of the page for a fraction of a second to get up to the tabs at the top of my web browser... and then doesn't go away until I mouse all the way back down past that big panal again, and particularly doesn't disappear if my focus is then off that window (if I go to another window and back over) but I mouse over it to the bottom right of the window again.  It is way too big, and the same information could probably be imparted with it it taking up a fourth or a fifth of the size.  I very frequently have multiple tabs open with other Daz products up on it, and that panel stays in place on that window tab if I switch to one of the other tabs and back and then mouse down into that pane area.  It completely blocks 90% or what should be visible to me on that window.  Seriously annoying.  At least now it seems to be going away a LITTLE more easily than it was yesterday.

     

    image_2023-07-21_003933580.png
    1426 x 780 - 701K
    Post edited by nomad-ads_8ecd56922e on
  • caravellecaravelle Posts: 2,455

    Snow said:

    While you guys are at it could you pretty please add a Show Wishlist Only button?

    I mean how hard can it be? This has already taken way too long. Is that too much to ask? really?

    Thank you!

    It is certainly not difficult; the question is whether it is desired. People who only want to see what's on their wishlist at a sale don't make impulse purchases. On the other hand, as Daz, I would consider whether too long sale lists are not a deterrent - especially if scrolling is made as inconvenient as it is now by removing the top scroll bar. And if - at least on the iPad - you are thrown back to the top row of the page every time you have looked at an article...

  • paolo_35229750paolo_35229750 Posts: 91
    edited July 2023

    One of the most useful features on any vendor's site with thousands of products is the 'Search' function.

    Why make it a chore?

    Why add an extra, useless click to the task of entering ad-hoc search terms?

    If a white text-box offends your sense of aesthetics, why not just apply more 'pleasing' colours to it?

    Did anyone who actually uses the site to shop test the user interface and ergonomics?

    Post edited by paolo_35229750 on
  • eric suscheric susch Posts: 133

    I'm seeing the side menu on firefox 115.0.2.

    Usually I need to click the shop button two or three times to re-load the top page whenever I start shopping, to make sure everything (current sales, newest items, wishlist, etc.) is loaded properly.  That used to be three clicks.  Now it's six clicks and six mouse moves.  Very clunky.  I'll probably just hit f5 a few times now.  The shop button is just too much work.

    Another problem - The current Daz+ freebie didn't show up when I sorted the main page Price Low-High.  Not sure why.  I think I found it on a sale page and eventually got it in my cart that way.

  • ValiskaValiska Posts: 82

    I have a side text menu. I'm on a laptop. Nice! It works. yes

    Particularly, I love the improved categorization where I can now find characters when I'm looking for characters.

  • ... and another thing ... When I were a Lad I used to right click on 'Shop' and open a new tab ... that was a quick way to look for something, dependencies, inspiration, more ways to spend my cash ... now the 'Shop' is 'Shop All' and hidden by a poxy Javascript menu ... more moving, more clicking.

    You guys ever heard of Repetitive Stress Injury?

  • SetaliaSetalia Posts: 49

    I'm not liking the new menu layout. I prefer the old layout. But perhaps that's because I've become accustomed to the old way.

  • scorpioscorpio Posts: 8,414

    shame that the vendor link has gone.

  • hjakehjake Posts: 891
    edited July 2023

    1. Top of page drop down banner is fine instead of the side list and allows for marketing images per item,.however I would prefer it did not drop down until I click on something. I often cause the banner to show when I am moving the mouse from the tab bar to the top of the webpage which obstructs my view. I am pleased this does not happen when I am in half page mode of 1920 x1080. I am also very please with how you have improved page flow when viewing the webpage at half screen width.

    2. I am REALLY disappointed that I can not add images to this forum posting to illustrate the issues I am expressing.

    3. Could you increase the number of items for search results (and the main store page) to include 120 and 200 items per page?

    4. On the left side column labelled categories, could you include a dropdown list that would filter the results by store categories and the sub-categories?

     

    5. Since DAZ is the keeper of the data concerning wishlist items and products owned, could you please build in the filters for items on wishlist and products owned instead of leaving it to third-parties or explain why they are capable of providing that feature but it is beyond the abilities of DAZ to do it?

     

     

    Post edited by hjake on
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