Tarted up for a Friday night (The dooyoo Redesign)

Member Name: sympatic

Product:	The dooyoo Redesign
Date:	18/01/08 (111 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You get used to it

Disadvantages: New review list

I guess over the past couple of months Dooyoo has seen a couple of design changes, one to the way the site looks especially the review writing page and now the new review list and secondly there has been a change to the reward system. Personally although I like the new reward system it is rather too early to comment on it, (although plenty of people already have, myself included in comments) and to be honest any comments are rather naive in that they are much too early for people to fully assess the impact on the site especially in the long term.

The changes to the design of the site however have become quite well established (except the change this week to the new review list) so it is perhaps a suitable time to review them.


Initially I was not a fan of the new changes as it seemed to squash all of the text across to one side of the page and meant that reviews just seemed to go on and on, this is a big problem given the verbal diarriah that some members suffer from managing to churn out 1,800 words on the most banal of products. The thing is, a few months on and now that I have become used to the new layout the issues I had no longer exist, it is amazing what you get used to. Reviews are often still too wordy but if they are I'm more likely just to give up reading them and rate accordingly hence the odd useful on an 1,800 word epic.

In fact I do think that the new layout may have helped encourage some writers to be a bit more concise and focus on the product rather than the waffle and word count.

Now I know it is early days so I'm going back on what I said at the start of the review but the New Review list does not seem to do what it sets out to do and in fact gives more prominence to those who write loads, not a bad thing for me as I write a fair bit now but it does not solve the problem of reviews going off the list quickly. I still use the old list as a much better way of sorting out what I want to read. Still maybe in another few months we will be used to that as well.

Summary: The redesig from a few months back