From technology to politics to video games; these are the random thoughts of a geek with too much time on his hands
Yes, we want your complaints!
Published on February 12, 2008 By Zoomba In 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.


Comments (Page 7)
11 PagesFirst 5 6 7 8 9  Last
on Feb 13, 2008
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?
on Feb 13, 2008

"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.

on Feb 13, 2008
"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. 
on Feb 13, 2008
There should be separate DX Objects, Widgets,Gadgets and Stand Alone galleries


on Feb 13, 2008
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.
on Feb 13, 2008
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.
on Feb 13, 2008
Please fix the RSS feed, it renders as a two-line borked summary for each item, publish a properly-formatted, full content feed.
on Feb 13, 2008
Items removed as they're not related to the site.

Not enough "how to do" instructions; i.e. docks.
on Feb 13, 2008
Eh Ronald....

This is a site features discussion, not a Stardock software issues thread
on Feb 13, 2008
Sorry bout the off topic response(S).
on Feb 13, 2008
10. The colors hurt my eyes!


Damn! Forgot to include my aversion to pastels...........
on Feb 13, 2008
I also agree with Tycus....swapping the ratings for fav's might be a better option to the rating problem. Then just sort by most popular instead of rating (more favs = more popular).
on Feb 13, 2008
I would like to see a go to page Number like for the WB's skins
and List of all WC user names..

CursorXP back on the list of skins you can go to.

and when you go to someones gallery and on the left side of home gallery have ObjectDock, Objectdock Icons, Etc. in it;s own place like Desktopx is

and be able to delete your old post
on Feb 13, 2008
and List of all WC user names..
Link at the bottom of the forum pages: https://www.wincustomize.com/sites.aspx
CursorXP back on the list of skins you can go to.
Click the edit link ont the sidebar gallery list
on Feb 13, 2008
I'd like to see a 2 things:
1) an option to see how many skins you see in one page. I could go for a lot at once instead of releatedly clicking the next button
2) WC needs to be less picky on the skins it chooses and accepts. For instance, I did a background spinoff on combining the Leopard space background with the Vista background. they said "You need permission from Microsoft and Apple Inc. to upload this" or something like that. yeah..... there's a big button on their websites that says "may we ask you whether or not we can use our artistic freedom" I agree if you copy someone else's work, that's different but you're not going to call Bill and (insert creator of Apple here) to ask them to make a cool background based on theirs.
11 PagesFirst 5 6 7 8 9  Last