topic:HP123 said:
I doubt many people use and check up the gear review page on this site but I have to say it has a terrible and ugly layout. Description choices have two options leaving extremely limited responses and therefore poor reviews.
For example "STYLE" the centerpiece in which NS constantly orbits around has two options. COOL AND UNCOOL. Talk about a limited system.
The blue-orange bar might be the worst graphic possible, with no indication of what side is favored not to mention half the time it's left in the center...
I do enjoy reading certain people's in depth review on a topic as some of them can be informative, however I do believe there's lots of room for improvement in the gear review system. Do you guys ever use it? What do you think of it?
**This thread was edited on Mar 8th 2016 at 2:04:45pm
**This thread was edited on Mar 8th 2016 at 2:07:48pm
Sooooo.....
There's a couple of things here.
First and foremost, I will admit that the user interface of this system was an utter disaster. We actually spent an enormous amount of time building the back-end to this, and thinking it out very carefully. However, when it came to building the user interface, we hired a new person on our team who was supposed to be a specialist in this area. Lets just leave it that he wasn't a fit and is no longer working for us.
The user interface currently hides what is an otherwise beautiful system.
Second - the system was designed to have a new take on gear reviews. Gear reviews in the past were primarily text based, and all skis were scored out of 10. Text was where you got all the good stuff, and everyone scored something a 10 because they liked it in certain conditions. As well, with the rise of mobile, we wanted to drastically simplify the process of reviewing by the masses.
So the idea is that a gear editor from our team writes an at-length review, delving deep into all the parameters of the product. Users then add quick reviews from their phone by setting a few sliders and writing a bit of text. All is displayed in one aggregate place where you can get the true view of a product.
The slider concept and why it does things like "Cool-Uncool" is it seeks to force people to quantify on a sliding scale the properties of a product... and then make them searchable in a database. If a product makes you feel "meh" about how cool it is, its in the center. If it makes you feel like Dr. Dre... then its way on the cool side. In aggregate it gets a score, and a new person can search for products which are cool, flexy, springy and durable. Boom - you get some results.
I really believe that the main issue here is with the design and user interface. The system works fantastically, but has a horrible way to use it. We simply ran out of time/resources to fix it and launched as-is with the idea that we'd return to it to fix it up.
The backing philosophy is behind the idea that no one piece of gear is "the best" - there is only what fits for what you want. Ski equipment is so diverse these days that its utterly impossible to answer what is the best ski - because it depends on how and where you want to ski it. I still think this philosophy is both wonderful and something that isn't addressed enough in most ski review places.
That all being said - we basically need to fix the Layout, or we need to scrap the whole thing and just write product reviews in the news. I would encourage everyone out there to give it more of a try, and perhaps make some suggestions about what you do/don't like... so that if we do end up getting around to tuning this thing we can really make it sing the way I think it could.
