The Dooyoo Redesign - November 2006 (The dooyoo Redesign)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	The dooyoo Redesign
Date:	03/12/06 (203 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some nice new features added. Good springboard for future features.

Disadvantages: Some pants ones (PM 'block' feature)

It seems like ages since Dooyoo had a proper redesign. The site has, if I can recall correctly, only two major updates in the six-odd years of its existence, and the last of those was back in September of 2002.

It's only within the past year or so that Dooyoo has started to get busier again and finally, it looks as if Dooyoo are going to start making serious changes to the site, in terms of technology.

This most recent update, for me, is extremely welcome. While the focus of the site is geared towards the non-member consumer, and the site has been set up with that in mind, the members supplying the content have been sadly overlooked.

Most of the recent changes to the site have been done with the member in mind and it's about time. For the past few years, it's almost as if Dooyoo had forgotten about its members or didn't care about them. At least with this stage of the redesign, it looks as if they're looking towards the members again. It's getting better, but there's still plenty of room for improvement.

I notice that the member search has disappeared. I'm not sure if this is deliberate or an oversight by Dooyoo, however, I must applaud this move and I do hope it stays away, even though it might prove annoying every now and again. "Why are you applauding such an action?" I hear you all cry! The answer, dear Dooyoo members, is that I prefer Dooyoo over other, similar sites because the community has always been slightly detached. Anything that encourages people to read by topic rather than by author has to be a move forward, especially if the resultant peer review means that good reviewers become successful rather than popular ones.

The private messaging system is a plus point to the site, enabling contact between members without contaminating the comments threads of reviews, which should be left for the discussion of the review and the related topic. Hopefully people will be able to make this distinction and perhaps we can return to comments threads that are interesting to read and don't contain crappy comments like "thanks for that", "really good list" or some such non-event.

I do have very serious concerns about the 'block' feature that's currently available. As a long term opinionator, I've seen at first hand the kind of behaviour exhibited by some people on the review writing sites. I don't think it's healthy behaviour and people can be quick to be offended far too often. By giving the members the power to block other members, then I believe the site will attract that kind of stupid, immature backstabbing political nature that's has been prevalent on Ciao for some time now. I propose a "report" button instead of the "block" button and that any action is taken by Dooyoo rather than the members. It is possible that this might initially create a little extra work for Dooyoo, but a stern hand that's unafraid to punish time wasters will soon mean that only proper abusive PMs is reported, rather than differences of opinion or unwanted contact. The punishment could be anything, but perhaps a removal of miles might encourage people to think before (over-re) acting. As members we should be encouraging mature communication with each other, not simply blocking someone at a whim.

I'd like to see a small address book available to members with a list of the incumbent guides on it, so that members can quickly get in contact and have any queries or questions answered. Additionally, I'd like to see email alerts for private messages to be included in the 'Email Alerts' system as an additional tool for members. The alerts can be added to the current email setup.

Ideally, I'd like to see the font size increased around Dooyoo. It's far too small at the moment and there are times when I'm practically squinting at the screen. Are you using Mozilla Firefox as your browser? Yes? Do me a favour and hold down the Ctrl key and hit the plus key once. There you are. Isn't that MUCH better? Yes? So why do we have to do it ourselves? Why can't Dooyoo have the site displayed normally with a readable font size? Gah! (It should be possible to change text size in Microsoft Internet Explorer too, but it doesn't seem to work on my PC).

It would be nice to have one or two formatting tools for our reviews. I'm not talking about anything drastic here, just a few tags for bold, underline and italic to help present our work. Personally, I write my reviews offline in a word processor, but I'm sure others don't. Some kind of spell checker might help some people. It would be a handy tool. There doesn't need to be anything more than that. Anything extra would be overkill in my opinion and completely unnecessary.

At the minute, some of the functionality is not working. Sadly, when the redesign was first unleashed, there were far too many issues immediately apparent in the software. Thankfully, most of these have been fixed, but there are still a few outstanding issues. For example, I can't select or make changes to my "Circle of Friends" email notification. Additionally, trying to add a member to my Circle of Friends is impossible on their profile, but it's still possible to add people from one of their reviews.

While it's not a functionality issue, why can't Dooyoo be consistent in the way it displays dates? At the moment it's UK/European (D/M/Y) in 'normal' Dooyoo i.e. New In lists etc. but American (M/D/Y) in the profile page. It's only a minor thing, but is a dent in the overall professional appearance of the site.

Back in the good old days, the comments sections were great for discussing all kinds of reviews. It really didn't matter who had written a review or what the topic was, if people were in the mood to chat about it, then they would. It was great fun just reading these, never mind taking part in the discussions. By removing direct access to the comments sections of reviews, I feel that the site is stifled slightly. Opening up access (the way it used to be) coupled with the PM system removing the need to chat in the comments threads should make the place a little more interesting.

While not a part of the recent redesign, I think it would be good if the member's area (or "News & Competitions" to give it its new funky name). At the moment it just looks a bit lifeless. An updated Guide's List is a good start followed by a bit of a graphical upgrade to make it a little more appealing to the eye. I'd like to see the new items be date-stamped so that members can see when a new item was posted. Ideally, any new news item could mean that all members are PMed by Dooyoo to let them know there's a new news item and that means members can be kept up to date with what's going on around the site (unless, you know, someone throws a huff with Dooyoo and blocks them).

And finally, a word on our member's dashboard which, overall, is pretty spiffy, is it not? I like it, though it would be nice to have a small selection of reviews at hand immediately – perhaps our ten most recently written. The dashboard seems to try and make everything much easier to get to, but it seems silly to have to provide our most recent reviews on a separate page. I'd question the logic behind having to click the "suggestions" item in the menu to open up the "Track My Suggestions" and "Make A Suggestion" links when they both open the same page. Remove the fancy jiggery pokery and one click on the "Suggestions" link can send you to the Suggestions page. Oh, while I'm on the subject of Suggestions, why does my already added item say "Complete", but still have a queue number on it? If it's sitting at 734, despite being added and my newer suggestion is at 834, does that mean the queue is less than 100 items long?

As I've stated at the beginning, I think that a few updates to the site for the benefit of the members was long overdue. While some of the changes aren't great or a bit rough around the edges, there is a stepping stone there to go on to adding better things for the site in terms of getting good content onto the web. As long as Dooyoo stays away from adding too many community-friendly features (because do we need a second Ciao?), then things should look up for members.

Overall, it's a B+ from me on the new additions.

Summary: Dooyoo finally adds some member focussed features.