Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

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sourisdudesert
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Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

Post by sourisdudesert »

Thank you very much for your feedback on the new Games list page.

A lot of you wrote to us or posted on these forums, and we would like to take a minute to especially thank those who took the time to explain their difficulties, what they dislike and why, but also what they like and why. If you have been on BGA for a long time, you know how much we are community based service and how much we listen to the community; however, it would also be a very bad idea to react to every message based on initial reaction to an update. This is why, during the past 2 weeks, we took the time to carefully analyze your comments and fix what needed to be fixed.

If you are a regular BGA user, you have probably already seen most of the upgrades described below; however, as there are so many we would like to take the time to describe them a little.

What you like particularly

You liked the fact that the page is faster now, with a better games categorization- a lot of you already created your own custom lists! :)


The "white stripes"

The titles displayed on "white stripes" is only a fallback display: our intention here is to provide high quality visuals for games, making them more attractive and easier to distinguish. However, with so many games, we needed to find a way to display games in the meantime that is coherent.

Today, we started to introduce these visuals for some games, so you can already see that the page looks way more attractive. In the following weeks, you will see more of them and the page will be more and more beautiful.


Icons are too big

Did you know that you can configure this, to choose bigger or smaller icons? The menu icon was not clear enough, so we changed it.


Custom default filters

The default filters displayed at the top allow you to quickly display a list of games matching a given filter. If you play a lot on BGA, you will progressively get more personalized default filters that match the games you play the most, so you can easily find nice games that suit you.



Latest games in Alpha or Beta

We detected some issues with the Alpha and Beta games lists, like games that were missing and the latest games released not being displayed first. These should be fixed now.




A lot of small fixes

We did a lot of "small" fixes following your feedback, like making it possible again to do "ctrl+click" on a game to open it in a new tab, or making the titles in the "white stripes" smaller to make sure they fit, or changing the "Recommended for 2 players" tag that was not clear enough.

The "Discover game" section was also not displaying a relevant game sometimes.

We also upgraded the "sorting" menu by adding new options (ex: Alphabetical sorting) and making its behavior more intuitive.

This list of upgrade is non exhaustive ;)

Conclusion

There is obviously still room for improvement and fixes to be done, but following your great feedback and the corresponding updates, we have no doubt that now this page is superior to the previous one.

Again, we would like to thank those of you who took the time to post constructive comments which allowed us to understand all of the different ways this page is used and how to improve it.

Enjoy!
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cigma
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Re: Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

Post by cigma »

sourisdudesert wrote: 20 April 2022, 10:57 The "white stripes"

The titles displayed on "white stripes" is only a fallback display: our intention here is to provide high quality visuals for games, making them more attractive and easier to distinguish. However, with so many games, we needed to find a way to display games in the meantime that is coherent.

Today, we started to introduce these visuals for some games, so you can already see that the page looks way more attractive. In the following weeks, you will see more of them and the page will be more and more beautiful.
Indeed this looks much better and is more relaxing for the eyes! Please make sure that it is legible: I would suggest the title of blood rage to be lighter, the title of Tarot should be emphasized more (maybe change the card-background), and the original fond should be used (actually the fond used for Can't stop belongs to Can't stop express and therefore can be misleading).

Thank you!
Last edited by cigma on 20 April 2022, 13:23, edited 1 time in total.
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cigma
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Re: Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

Post by cigma »

I just found out that the "New games list page" is not included in the releases summaries https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 9&start=10 of 6th April 2022 (or around that date). I think it should be added there.
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kev360uk20
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Re: Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

Post by kev360uk20 »

The new look images with the logo are better than the white bars but I still don't like having to scroll right on all the different genres.

I havent checked on pc yet but I hope the "discover" element will be removed. Especially when it's a game I've already played 20+ times. And also hope the hover over 'pop out' clips are removed. Looking like netflix isn't a good thing.
GeraldineMerida
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Joined: 15 December 2020, 07:27

Re: Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

Post by GeraldineMerida »

kev360uk20 wrote: 20 April 2022, 19:33
I havent checked on pc yet but I hope the "discover" element will be removed. Especially when it's a game I've already played 20+ times.
No, it's still there, and even more annoyingly, is still above the much more useful list of new Beta games (so I can 'discover' games that I actually might want to play, unlike anything that has ever been recommended to me in that huge, unwelcome banner').

The single improvement I would most like to see to the new page is the option to permanently remove some lines from the display (the filter options are useless to me, as they stand, but being able never to see, e.g. 'popular games' and 'short games' would be great).

At present, even on a PC, I have to scroll down much too far to see ANYTHING of interest to me.
kradd13
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Joined: 21 April 2022, 13:48

Re: Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

Post by kradd13 »

Just not a fan of the new layout. The white stripes overwhelm and everything becomes a blur of sameness. Maybe on a different platform the side scrolling works, but on pc it gives me windows 8 vibes. Yes you can right click to open in a new tab, but you have to time it between the hover image popping up. Feels like a fix for something that wasn't broken.
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Dr Nefario
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Joined: 28 December 2020, 19:09

Re: Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

Post by Dr Nefario »

Sorry, but this new style is very user unfriendly, and I can see that you try to save it replacing the white line with a better title, but doesn't really matter how you decorate a wrong design it will remain a wrong design.
What just happened? You created a new box instead of a well recognizable game box but that failed because even you can't tell which box belongs to which game, so a decision was made lets use the original title style from the box just to get back something from the original game box design. Does it help? Yes definitely it helps. Why? Because everyone recognizes the original boxes. What would be then the optimal solution? Revert completely this custom design to the original game box. Would you do that? Most probably not because you invested a lot of effort into the new one and now you want to believe that it is fine and you started to explain it that it is faster, blah blah. Maybe yes it is faster I can not recognize it, and I can't see anybody chanting how fast is it and how slow was the old one. But I can see that a lot of people are complaining how useless is the new design. So I think this should ring the bell: hey we are going to the wrong direction, our users are complaining, and finally we should give for the user a better interface and not for us and not for the best pet of the manager, this is why it is called user interface or UI at the end.
So lets summarize the biggest misconception:
- creating custom boxes - even you recognized how bad idea was it
- scrolling to the right - maybe on a TV would be ok, but just measure how many users are playing on a TV, and if you find that not everybody then create a custom layout for TVs, on any other device this is a bad idea.
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Lemonhatred
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Joined: 09 December 2020, 18:06

Re: Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

Post by Lemonhatred »

Look back over the old thread, try and find a single positive comment about your new games page.

Everyone thinks it is less usable than the old page. I'm sure it cost a lot in time and/or money, but no one wanted a suggestion algorithm and no one wanted baffling sideways scrolling.

I very much doubt anybody outside of your team thought the games page needed to be "updated". Please revert.
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KentuckyGamer
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Re: Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

Post by KentuckyGamer »

For the most part I like the new format. The categories scroll quickly. I also like the summary of a game that appears when you mouse over the game icon.

The one thing I miss is the ability to search for all games with a particular player count. You have a listing for 2 players, but my group hits from 3-5 players, and occasionally 6. Is the ability to search for player counts hidden somewhere?

Thanks
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cigma
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Joined: 15 December 2020, 00:30

Re: Gamelist page feedback & upgrades

Post by cigma »

KentuckyGamer wrote: 22 April 2022, 02:41 The one thing I miss is the ability to search for all games with a particular player count.
On the games page at the upper right corner, you find the "filter". If you click on it, you can filter all games for several categories, including player count.

By the way: This is basically no new tool (allthough it was updated). It was very much the same in the old design, but often overlooked.
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