Consultation: Improving the browsing of RoadTests (and maybe RoadTest Reviews)

Hi Christopher,

I don't know how it could best look like, but one thing that would be great to see is a way of unifying all content related to a product. 

When I want to read a product review I also like looking at the actual RoadTest page for it too, since that often has a lot of information/links as well. 

Maybe that best unified page is already the RoadTest Review page for the product, and then it just needs some tweaks to call that out more, since it is easy to miss that the reviews are listed to the side of the page. For instance that orange button is bright, and that could have the text slightly modified. Also, a grey/black box for the reviews maybe, rather than the current white box.

Also, there is often a forum page for people to ask questions if they need help with the RoadTest, and if that could be somehow listed on the RoadTest page for the product (like with the orange bar in the mockup above) then that would be great too, and might encourage the reviewers to complete if they can see comments appearing from people from time to time throughout the review easily, i.e. that's something we as the readers can make more effort on, so having a link to the product forum page that is easy to find might push users to do that.

Basically I think the suggestions above are aiming to make the RoadTest page feel like a hub for information on a particular product perhaps, but admittedly makes the page look messier with all these colored boxes perhaps.

EDIT: Just realized that changes to the RoadTest page is out of scope. That might make the above redundant : (

Hi Shabaz,

These are good points to take into consideration (you reflect on one point which is a bit of an up in the air, which is comments on a RoadTest vs using a thread on the forum, which I see as a duplication) for the content on the RoadTest and RoadTest Review themselves, though the intended focus here is a step away or above from the functionality of the RoadTest and Review pages, which is being able to discover and navigate to the RoadTest page, and the RoadTest Review page and present them to the person looking for them or looking through them.

Also, something like this could be interesting, but I don't know if it is possible. 

Ah I see, sorry, I didn't read more thoroughly. I'll have a think about discovery/navigation. There are thousands of RoadTest reviews on the site at a guess! so it's important to be able to find them as you say.

I've got quite a few ideas and (perhaps personal) gripes with the way RoadTest reviews are being presented.

The first thing I dislike is the greyness of the background - is there any reason why it should be offset from the rest of the site's regular white background colour scheme? The other is the sidebar review navigation ... it steals a lot of valuable horizontal space from the review which means images are smaller than necessary. Along with the sidebar on the right and padding, it seems only 60% of the viewport is review body when on a desktop.

I especially dislike this when I'm browsing on my mobile in landscape because it looks something like this:

It makes reading absolutely horrible in the landscape mode, but the portrait mode seems to turn the navigation into a dropdown from the top which is much nicer, but getting that to work reliably for me on the phone is a bit problematic as I might select a subheading to go to and sometimes it goes to the wrong one. It often happens for my reviews where there are many subheadings - if you start at the top and select a subheading that's a long way down the document, sometimes it goes partway through the previous subheading and just stops (Firefox Mobile). Perhaps that's just my phone. Zooming images is also an issue on mobile as the popover is not allowed to pinch to zoom.

As for the way the RoadTests Reviews are presented on the RoadTest home page, it seems there is a bit of duplication with the Recent Reviews (List) and Recent Reviews (Excerpts) which was decided upon last time as a compromise due to Verint limitations. This is then also duplicated by the Recent RoadTests and Reviews widget, as long as one selects the Reviews tab. Being shoved into the right sidebar or behind a tab click seems to demote the reviews below that of the Recent Blog Posts which have their own main-area widget which I don't feel is great.

I'd like to see the Recent Reviews be similar to Recent Blog Posts - keeping the mix of both (i.e. star ratings, view counts, headline, author, excerpt). I feel that it is important to highlight all of these things.

I feel the reviews could be better showcased by having a "RoadTest Browser" page which has different filters that link to the reviews in ways like:

• Reviews by Item Type
• Reviews by Vendor
• Reviews by Author
• Reviews by Year

If the tiles have images of the actual product, that would make it easier to "browse around" and would be a more pictorial way of accessing the other reviews for the same product or for competing products in the market segment. I feel this may be especially important as under the new platform, authors can title their reviews practically anything they want, so whether the full name of the item is in the title is not a guarantee anymore.

- Gough

I browse the content on Windows PCs only.  The phone is just too small for an enjoyable experience.

The first thing I'd recommend is in line with Gough Lui "s comment on the grayness. The tabs are very inconspicuous.  They shouldn't be.  Use the same inverted color scheme as the circles above to draw attention to the tabs - especially the Reviews tabs.

Yeah... the graphic above is uninspiring.  It should help trigger my distracted brain to go look.

How about a second Search search bar on the Roadtest Group landing page that has selectable filters by Reviewer, by Roadtest, by Sponsor, or Within the Last 12 Months?  The advanced Search feature isn't so flexible as to find everyone but whatever algorithm populates it could scrape the Roadtest reviewers from the Roadtest and build the dropdown.

The reviewer rating of the product and number of views is definitely of interest to me.  I struggle with a "Top Reviews" section because once I read the Roadtest... I move on.  HOWEVER, If I haven't read it... I will.  Therein lies the struggle.  If we go that route, it should land immediately beneath the Open Roadtests.  The Recent Roadtests pane on the right is very useful and I don't think it need to change.

My 2 cents. 

kmikemoo said:

The phone is just too small for an enjoyable experience.

Not to ignore the rest of your (very good) points - what's the screen resolution of your phone?

Another interesting discovery - not related to RoadTests specifically, but just browsing on mobile and it seems the image shabaz pasted shows with the wrong dimensions making it horizontally compressed. Tapping on it shows it correctly sized ...

I do see mobile quirks like this from time to time ... but I haven't systematically noted them down.

- Gough

iPhone 9, 750 x 1334 pixels, 294 ppi.  The phone thing is way more of a "Why stare at a tiny screen when I can just fire up the computer or laptop?"

I find the mobile experience on my phone (Android) significantly different between mobile Samsung Internet Browser and mobile Chrome.

With the former, the display is pretty good, and I can pinch-and-zoom any page to see the detail in images, and they (usually) don't seem stretched any more, although as you say it does occur from time to time.

With mobile Chrome on the other hand, the pinch-to-zoom doesn't work and I cannot really use the website as a result. 

I've set up a link on my mobile home page that opens it up on Samsung Internet Browser (because I use Chrome for regular use on other websites), and I've been generally happy with it. If you've got more than one browser on your phone it could be worth experimenting, in case it helps.

Examples from the Samsung Internet Browser:

Pinch-to-zoom to see detail, the image comes out clear like this:

RoadTest review, clear to read and pinch-to-zoomable:

I wish the experience was the same on mobile Chrome, because I suspect a lot of people will be using that on Android instead of the Samsung Internet Browser, and they won't have realized it's better if they switch.

How I have it set up on my phone home page: