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

cstanton

Hello everyone,

I'm interested in improving how you can look through and browse RoadTests (and probably RoadTest Reviews).

You should all be familiar with the RoadTest group landing page:

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And then if you want to browse RoadTests past and present:

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And RoadTest Reviews past and present:

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You may already be thinking "But  , this is fine!" and that's good feedback.

However you may be thinking "I put a lot of work into my RoadTest Review, I want it to be visible, for people to find it, for it to look nice!" and that's something I'm interested in as well.

Currently there're some challenges if you're looking for a RoadTest and its associated Reviews that I can see, as it's hard to:

- Find all the reviews by a particular manufacturer or supplier

- Find all of the reviews about a particular product, especially if the reviews aren't all posted at once

- See an 'aggregated' overall 5 star review that takes into account all reviews of the product/roadtest

What's useful to keep in mind when thinking about this is:

- If we're presenting new information, where will that come from?

- Can we reuse information that's already shown?

o Examples of this can be:

x Images of products from a RoadTest page

x Names of products/suppliers from a RoadTest page

x The description of the product from the RoadTest page

x Review stars from RoadTest Reviews

x Possibly images from RoadTest Reviews (if they're included)

x Links to RoadTests and RoadTest Reviews

It's also a bit easier for us if we can re-use 'widgets' or 'tools' that already exist on the site. An example might be if we consider the 'project videos' from element14 presents being a good way to show content:  Project Videos Might be adaptable as a way to search through RoadTests and Reviews?

But it's also important for us to know, how you use and browse this content, and how that experience is on a mobile device vs on a desktop device.

Note, what's out of scope for this request, are any changes to the current RoadTest or RoadTest Review layout of those content types themselves.

So, thoughts?

 

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  • 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.

    image

    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 : (

Reply

  • 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.

    image

    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 : (

Children
  • in reply to shabaz

    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.

  • in reply to cstanton

    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.