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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:

image

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

image

And RoadTest Reviews past and present:

image

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?

 

Parents

  • 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.

    image

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

    image

    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

  • in reply to Gough Lui

    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 ...

    image

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

    - Gough

Reply
  • in reply to Gough Lui

    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 ...

    image

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

    - Gough

Children
  • in reply to Gough Lui

    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:

    image

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

    image

    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:

    image

  • in reply to shabaz

    I do have multiple browsers on my (non-Samsung) phone, but it seems Mi Browser, Chrome Mobile and Firefox Mobile behave the same with regards to the image aspect ratio distortion and zooming. Perhaps Samsung browser is the anomaly here ...

    - Gough