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I think this is an important point, as some main products have less than great promos and textures, which do not help sell the item: all eye-of-the-beholder stuff, but important. A real advance would be to link a product to both vendor extra textures and those by other people. (I assume from this that this is a failing, but I will watch out for examples. this would add value,m perhaps drive sales.)
The next frustrating thing for me is that I use a mouse button to go back a step on webpages. It used to be I would be on the store home page, click on a product and then hit back and I would be back at the store home page I came from. Now it takes two clicks of the same button to go back a page. The fist click does something, swirly realoading at the top of the browser but it stays on the same page, it takes a second click to actualy do something. Microsoft Edge.
So, everyone's criticisms of the new store layout pretty much echo most of my own, but here's the thing I don't get: You went through this whole process a year ago with exactly the same chaos, and the same incredible frustration with your customers and their shoppig experience. Only that time people couldn't download the purchases they had just made. You guys do this in the middle of "new sales" events ( although to be fair, when is there ever a not a new sales event?) Maybe,...and I know this is a bizarre concept so bare with me, you DON'T do this when you have a sale going on. Just stop releasing product, clue people into what you are doing, deal with the feedback, and move on accordingly. You make us your lab rats, and when you shake the cage up and down like this, it tends to rattle the herd. So rather than getting measured criticism, you get panicked "Just make it go away" responses. From the distorted preview images ( and I mean seriously distorted) it is very clear, that this change wasn't ready to go live. So why on earth did you do that? And why after last year's fiasco, do you keep making the same monumental mistakes? Couldn't you have set up a dummy website and ask people to go there and check it out? That way, the people who want to participate are doing it with the understanding, that it's a test. Meanwhile the people who have absolutely no interest in participating in your hap-hazard redesign, don't get angry and run away until the dust settles. You guys have operated on a barely functional EQ for years now, and honestly, that's what you really need, is feedback at the needless spreading of ill will amongst your customer base. Long ago I stopped being a DAZ -Fanatic. Recently I've given up affection for Daz. Now I just barely tolerate the brain dead decision making and realize, that it wasn't love appreciation or respect, that I was getting from you, it was a cold calculated dysfunctional transactional relationship. Caveat Emptor. You go back to your white sleeveless t-shirts, and beer, I'll go back to my girl friends and cry over salads and chocolate cake.
I am not included in this test which is a shame, as UI development and providing feedback is something I do... quite a bit of. That's why I asked yesterday how to see the page; I wanted to help you. I'm happy to help you more if I can be given access to it, but if not, I fully understand, and I will offer feedback when it pops up at random!
The product where I'm seeing is is this, so it's probably not the best for comparison, but I have both pages open right now, so I can provide my thoughts on the differences.
https://www.daz3d.com/lamh-2-iray-catalyzer
Plus points:
Drawbacks:
So overall, I don't think this is a good way to present the product. I hope that's helpful, and again, I fully appreciate than in an A/B test, not everyone gets the new stuff.
Edit: I've worked out how to get the new page fairly consistently so I can now try other platforms and let you know what I think. It also meant I could try other products, and I can see that you only suck out most of the colour from the thumbnails. I still think that's bad, and if you were going to change only one thing, it should be that.
So here's a comparison of old and new (which I guess is something I can only do because I am cheating!)
Which of these gives me a better impression of everying the product can do? Colour is quite important in this specific product... Realistically, is anyone going to click on all 23 images / press next 23 times / use the awkward scrolling to see everything the procuct offers? In this product it's variations on a theme, but in others there are very significant differences that still will usually require colour to be visible. Currently I can see enough to know what interest me with no UI interaction at all.
Unfortunately my method to get the page doesn't seem to work on iOS browsers, but I assume that scrolling on those is a going to be hard (but I'd need to try it).
I managed to get to the product pages on tablet and mobile. I encounter an issue on iOS 14 / Chrome on the iPad. I have attached the screenshots. As you can see the "slidy thing" is stretching the pictures to the extent that on the OOT shader, it's pretty much unusable. (I will raise a ticket.)
At the risk of labouring the point, I've also attached the original page for the hair textures as an ilustration of how much more clearly the product's various options are presented at a glance. Say I want to know it it has textures for red hair. What do I do to find out before and after? Before-look at the page, after-click / scroll a lot.
A few more thoughts on these platforms...
On the phone, I think it works really nicely, a huge improvement.
On the tablet, I didn't find it worked as well and I preferred the old page
Again I hope this helps. If there are other things I'm not seeing, I'm more than willing to take a look, and if that's hard, I understand.
FYI I normally look at all the pictures for a product before I make a decision to buy or not. Lots of items have lots of bad pictures so it pays to look at them all.
I was trying to look at bundles yesterday in the new format and I still haven't figured it out. If an item is in a bundle, I look at the bundle for many reasons. Am I waiting on the bundle? Am I buying out of the bundle because I have given up on it getting to a price I will pay? I couldn't figure out what bundles I owned versus what is in the bundles or anything functional. Very bad mess.
Hi!
I am a longtime DAZ user, I've spent several 1000s of dollars over the years. But I will pause as a protest. I am sorry.
Here are the reasons briefly:
DETAILED PAIN POINTS:
1) Unusable for Bundles. Example https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-8-1-university-bundle
2) Required Products
3) Already Owned Button
4) Black background
CAN YOU PLEASE...:
This may not please you, but that, in a way, is what they are doing. I think they are running an A/B test. It's fairly standard practice.
https://www.optimizely.com/optimization-glossary/ab-testing/
Divide your users into two random groups (possibly more) and give them different sites and see which performs best. In this case, maybe it's see which group buys most stuff.
I still get the old page, but it's not too hard to get to the new one (it popped up randomly yesterday and I tried doing the same thing again and found I got the new page about 1 in 5 times).
I have very little experience of it, as I've really just played with it for the purposes of feedback, but my big criticism is that previously I could see everything, and now I can't. I think when I get this, I would end up buying less because I will miss things. I'll often buy on the strength of the thumbnails and now they are virtually monochrome.
So I don't see that they'll stick with this in its current form because it makes it harder to see the products, and therefore you are less likely to buy. If it's an effort to see something, you are far less likely to bother looking.
Even if Daz keeps the Dark color scheme, please.. for the love of all things kind and fluffy.... please enhace color variance and contrast. Its like a sea of dark pastels. Or 50 shades of grey.
AHHH!!! WHATS THE SAFE WORD! UNCLE UNCLE!
And as expected DAZ Deals don't work with the new pages... No readme's, no links to forum...
It does. Or at least it should. Make sure you are running the latest version.
Version 2.5.1 on Yandex
Version 3.x is the one that works with the new store design. Version 3.0.4 is the latest that works with the new product pages as well.
Thanks, but the Opera store still shows 2.5.1 as the latest
For Opera, I wound up having to delete 2.5.1 from the Opera extensions store, and get 3.X from the Chrome extensions store to get version 3.
Even so, it seems to be only partially functioning on Opera. I get recent price history in the cart, and that's it. No link to readme, no price history in the product information, nothing else that the extension does on Firefox.
Further comment: I can see the value in making images more prominent. But today for some reason pages were loading slowly, so very hard to find what I wanted and individual larger thumbnails hung.
Ah so the incredibly distorted images is because I was using Safari, a Mac browser! I get it. Much like Daz studio NOT being compatible with Mac OS Big Sur for 9 months. Any idea about when you're going to get around to supporting Safari?
The new layout leaves A LOT to be desired. I do like the color scheme, but that's about it. Now you have to scroll down to read the product description, which is not ideal. Basically it's a lot of extra scrolling for no reason and I'm not happy with it. The existing page layout is pretty much perfect and it seems to me like this whole thing is coming about because someone wants to prove how smart they are by changing something that wasn't broken to begin with. To me, if you want to do some web redesign --why don't you take a stab at something that hasn't been improved in over a decade --like the FAQ section and the abandoned Advanced Documentation Center. This is a waste of time and effort to improve something everyone was already satisfied with. To me, the new web pages are the Windows 8 of web page design.
I also like the section that said which products were used in the promotion. I thought that was much better.
But I don't think they should mess too much with the top section too much. That needs to be immediate, clear, and simple. On the page they are trialling, it's too complicated.
Once a shopper can finally find the "what is included in this bundle" section hidden under a collapsed "features" section, all he sees are the names of the products included in the bundle. There are no associated thumbnails. That drives my interest in the bundle to zero. I'm not going to click on each individual link and open another browser page, just to see what the product is. Boo. This design will drive sales into the ground - from me, at least. It is inconceivable that this design was fully deployed after being tested for weeks with a partial user base. Was shopper feedback totally ignored with a "we know best" attitude?
I got the new design on more and more products.
I can see absolute no adavantage in that design. The old one was much better.
So maybe someone who created the new design can explain the advantages and explain how to use them. Thanks in advance.
I've now looked at this site in Firefox instead of Safari. Rather different: not sure why.
Can I also highlight the problem with Bundles: I could buy a pair of shorts, and I'm told they are only in an outfit bundle; if I look at the outfit bundle, I can see it is only in a Kola bundle; and presumably if I looked at the Kola bundle, that would be in the Mega bundle. Is this really helpful to customers?
New layout has no clear concept. All revelant information not in one area. Bundle pages are horrible, waste a lot of screen space: split view for artwork/promos, bundle content as text links - really?
And first and formost: what was wrong with the old one? Make it dark themed if you have to but keep it at that. I f you want to change something for the better provide better search options and fix the shop so revoked items don't show as "Free" in my wishlist.
+1 and echoing what many people are noting- make bundles EASY to figure out, not a royal pain in the booty.
Like the black background, but as someone else noted about the videos- they aren't IMPORTANT. The bundle information, related products, and what was used in the promos are more important to me than a video. It was in the right place in the old store design- at the bottom.
The only thing I can think of that would make it worse that our wishes have been ignored about this site would be if we had voted for it.
Yesterday, it took me hours to figure out what was in the sale and what was not. I had bought the Teen Kola 8.1 Bundle the day before, but because of the design of the page, it took me a bit to see that line that said the items I already owned would be 'discounted'. I tested the items I wanted, then the Mega Bundle and yes, the Mega was cheaper. But I waited to see if a flash sale would pop up during the day with something I wanted. Nope, old hairs. So I finally bought it. And that spent my March budget.
But as I printed the promo pages as .pdfs I found that the SKUs weren't being printed on all the pages, and what I dispise is the wasted space on what was produced. I use those pages to give me information on usage (remember that many PAs use their images to show how to use their products), what the required products are, if they are a material set or a prop or whatever. With older items it is easy to tell a material product is that because you see its code line, but on a .duf it could be almost anything. Some do have material in the naming structure, but others do not. But I love the pictures for themselves. The PAs put a lot of work into them. I appreciate that. That awful blured mess is dreadful.
I have sent in a Customer Service report with my feedback days ago, before I knew about the SKUs not always printing.
I don't want advertising to YouTube unless it is to a tutorial by the PA for usage of the product. I don't like having to open up hidden fields to print them.
What I don't understand is how a professional company can repeatedly make this kind of mess, when a free website without advertising, for writers to post stories, can manage to set-up a test framework and have a variety of users, admins, writers, readers who all give feedback and help in the design and work to improve the old site that has had to reinvent itself three times due to servers, software, and other issues. By doing that we have a site that is stable, able to be read by people who have vision issues (legally blind without aids) and is accessible worldwide. And still free.
And I am also avoiding the store as well. The changes that have happened to ruin the shopping experience, the emphasis on poorer quality, weird metadata assignment, items that never show up in Smart Content, are saving me a group of cash.
My thanks to DAZ.
But, I guess the latest shiny piece of trash in the Metaverse is worth it? Yes?
Thank you for this thread! I agree with everyone's comments above! I am also a frequent shopper with far more purchases than I am proud to say. I find the store's filters and search function to leave a lot to be desired. I find that the 3rd party Daz-deals extension (which I really feel should be permanently incorporated) to be more useful when navigating the store. And now with the new format, many of the features of the extension are not available either.
Features that would be uber helpful, if not absolutely essential, for shopping at the Daz Store:
1. Being able to type in the artist's name in the filter rather than scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And you are going to make me scroll, please make it alphabetical! (So annoying... I don't know if Zeddicuss is at the bottom or in the middle of the list... sorry I can't memorize how many products each artist has in any category
)
2. Being able to parse out "Characters", "Poses", "Outfits", "Textures", "Hair", "Props" for each figure. I really do not have time to search through 8441 items for Genesis 8 female looking for a Hair product. Also a way to hide / show textures would be very helpful. Sometimes it is useful not to have to wade through pages of textures to find the base item.
3. To follow up on that, 8441 items for Genesis 8 female - really? I am grateful for all the artists producing these products but the filter is daunting and down right useless.
4. Additional filter (radio) buttons:
5. One feature I use all the time from the Daz-Deals extension that would be nice on the "sort by" function is "% off"
6. A quick indicator showing what items I already OWN in a bundle would be very useful (like the "new" or "sale" or even the heart indicator for wishlist items). More than once have I viewed a bundle only to find out after I click on every single item that I owned almost all of them already. Now with the new format I have to click not just the icon for the item in the bundle, I have view the item in another window... I'm getting carpal tunnel syndrome from all the clicking... which means I won't be able to shop anymore!
7. A follow up to the above, similarly an indicator for WISHLIST items in a bundle would definitely increase the likelihood of purchase!
8. Being able to accurately search for a specific product and its associated addons. (This should be #1 by the way, but I was so annoyed by #1...
) For example, I search for "Love me hair". Not only do I get the product and its Genesis version and its one texture addon, I also get 16 unrelated items including the Zale 8.1 Landlubber bundle (???). And this is with a older product with very few associated items, and the funny part is the actual named product is listed somewhere in the middle even when sorted by RELEVANCE. 
I am really grateful for all the work that goes in to making the DAZ shop and supporting all of the artists here that are dedicated to making such great products. I would love to be able to support them even more by being able to find the products in a easier way. Ok I think I am done for now.
May I ask how you "cheated"? I would love to go back to the old version!