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 8)
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on Feb 13, 2008
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
This is an option for subscribers
on Feb 13, 2008
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


This is already in place to subscribers


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.



Build the image from scratch and it might pass moderation. (mods are really critical of what gets allowed) Taking others images and reediting then and trying to upload them without permission wont.

on Feb 14, 2008
WinCustomize needs better support for the Opera browser.
While I realise most users go with IE and fx there are still people, like me which prefer Opera and still wants to use WinCustomize to browse skins, buy some master ones etc. (yeah I buy master skins)
on Feb 14, 2008
how about getting rid of the sins gallerys and adding a desktopx gadget page
on Feb 14, 2008
I'd like to be able to upload to my photo gallery from Vista instead of having to boot into XP to do it
on Feb 14, 2008
The thread new-page issue that kicks you back to page one once a new page forms...even though you had read one and two already...and wanted actually to get to three without stepping through them [yes, happened here and now on this one] is simply a pain in the bum ....
on Feb 14, 2008
WinCustomize needs better support for the Opera browser.


1) I agree. I do always use Opera.

2) Diggs for skins. More diggs will show that more people want you to try the skin.

3) In the skin page show the list of people and number of people who have added the skin to the favorites.

4) Make the comments in the personal page more arranged and give options to organize them, like showing ten recent ones in the main page and for rest give a 'more' button.
on Feb 14, 2008
Randomly the recent posts list will only show about 10 posts and when you go to the next page, about 5 hours worth of posts are missing (Fuzzy and I have reported this a lot).

"Rate this reply" uh, why? A bit worthless, doesn't do anything. And if it did, this could easily be abused like the rating system. "I don't like this twit, I'm going to rate all their replies 'trolling' muhahahah!"
on Feb 14, 2008
I still would luv to see our personal pages become more personal, colouring, wallpaper, ect......i think this is already in the works, or already being contemplated........but, i personally cant wait to see it happen. it will be very nice,
on Feb 14, 2008

I'd like to be able to upload to my photo gallery from Vista instead of having to boot into XP to do it

Might have been mentioned before but the WC Photo Gallery is not nice to FireFox either. If you have IE Tabs addon, photos can be uploaded in FF.

on Feb 15, 2008
Timestamps in the forums: Can't read 'em; they're not local and they're using the 24 hour time format. Would be nice if they were actually using our local time and we had the option to select between 12/24 hour formatting.
on Feb 15, 2008
I still would luv to see our personal pages become more personal, colouring, wallpaper, ect......i think this is already in the works, or already being contemplated........but, i personally cant wait to see it happen. it will be very nice,


Seconded!

Nice to see ya around, kitty! LTNS
on Feb 15, 2008
The security feature for sending PMs seems broken. More times than not, it will mistakenly tell me I have typed the letters incorrectly. Granted, I may get it wrong occasionally, but not 9 of 10 times!   

So far it always works the second try.
on Feb 15, 2008
So far it always works the second try.


It never works on the first try for me..... I thought it was a feature, not a bug
on Feb 15, 2008
The security feature for sending PMs seems broken. More times than not, it will mistakenly tell me I have typed the letters incorrectly. Granted, I may get it wrong occasionally, but not 9 of 10 times!


All this time I thought it was me........
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