i just wanted to drop a small list of small but useful(?) optimizations that could help improve the user experience here at umd.net.
1) The title text i can add for my usergalleries seems too short. The length i can use for the images in the galleries may be good for the galleries. see:
2) A field for a gallery description may be useful?!
3) It would be great if we could link our models to the galleries or single pictures.
4) Having a list of "friends" at umd seems to be pointless for me. How about a "friends"-stream to get informed if a "friend" uploads new images, videos, creates a topic etc?!
5) The "views" counter in my profile is a pretty nice feature. How about a detailed statistic for that? Eg. views today, yesterday, last week, this month, last month?
6) I'm from europe and i think umd is hosted in the usa? I noticed that most assets used to render the umd webpage are not cached (send with proper cache header) for faster delivery so that i sometimes have to wait until the complete website is rendered in my browser. I made a test with the main/news page. It takes 15 seconds until all assets have been downloaded in the first request and it takes 15 seconds for the 2nd request. At least all static stuff like javascript libraries and commonly used images should be cacheable by the browser.
7) The "intro" page where i have to descide if i want to enter umd.net or not appears a lot of times. At least if my previous user session (i'm logged in) is still valid, the intro should not appear.
Sorry for my late response, but I wanted to give this post the attention it deserves. I'll add your ideas to my To Do list if I can fit them in. I'll respond point by point.
>The title text i can add for my usergalleries seems too short.
It's set at only 40 characters now, but that's because we have to fit your title under the album thumbnails, plus at the top of the page when viewing the gallery. Any more and it gets unwieldy for display purposes. For example this album's title has 36 characters, and it completely fills the top of the page in widescreen mode: http://umd.net/profile/idtitle/planetwam/section/photos/album/busty-babe-having-fun-in-the-b The album titles aren't meant to be synopses or real descriptions; rather just a few words to hook viewers into clicking them! Alternatives would be to allow the longer lengths, but clip them upon display (nasty) or adjust font sizes dynamically so all of it could fit, which is less effective IMO than enforcing brevity and clarity within 40 characters. What do you think? (I'll add a character count to the Album Name field--it should have already been there.)
> A field for a gallery description may be useful?!
Nobody's ever asked for that, but that should be relatively easy, plus I can stuff that extra metadata into the your gallery's tags for extra SEO for your gallery. I'l add that to my To Do list.
> It would be great if we could link our models to the galleries or single pictures.
I think I'll do that. It would be great for the gallery search facility, which sucks right now as there are not many keyword hooks, but this would enhance those searches significantly if people actually use it. Thanks!
> Having a list of "friends" at umd seems to be pointless for me. How about a "friends"-stream to get informed if a "friend" uploads new images, videos, creates a topic etc?!
Yeah I made Friends more as a bookmarks list for people you like to visit a lot. It also works with the chat so it knows who to put on your list if you have it set to only show friends. Other than that, I haven't hooked a lot into it. It's more to promote camaraderie and morale than anything else. We do have a notifications system where you can subscribe to any user, and you'll see that exact activity you mentioned, on your Notifications page. We don't have a wall or stream or anything like that, but using notifications, you can subscribe to your own friends, and non-friends too.
> The "views" counter in my profile is a pretty nice feature. How about a detailed statistic for that? Eg. views today, yesterday, last week, this month, last month?
That's a little more data-intensive than I think I can handle right now. I think a simple hit counter, and the ability to reset it, is enough for folks right now.
> I noticed that most assets used to render the umd webpage are not cached
I'm continually working on caching of all sorts, and it's tricky for a lot of reasons, but that will be improved over time. We're actually serving retina images all over the place, and it does kill our bandwidth and slow down page loads, especially for the items that are not browser-cached!
> The "intro" page where i have to descide if i want to enter umd.net or not appears a lot of times. At least if my previous user session (i'm logged in) is still valid, the intro should not appear.
It's set to expire (and appear again) after 24 hours, whether you log out or not. I decided to do that more as overprotective due diligence than anything (for the billers and banks and hosts and governments). I figure it shouldn't be too inconvenient to get the Nag screen just once a day. What I *can* do is make it keep resetting the 24-hour counter as you are active on the site going from page to page. Right now it expires 24 hours regardless. Duh I should have thought of that before.
Thanks again for your suggestions. They're always welcome. I slapped UMD Premium on your account for a month to say thanks.
Messmaster said: I just added in the gallery descriptions! Please try it out and leave feedback good sir.
MM
Thanks again for all your efforts such as those above
A small annoyance, and to see what I'm talking about you might need to close your browser or clear your cache -- bear with me:
Using PlanetWAM's Gallery as an example, in each Album there is an option to "Sort by name/date", and I'm pretty sure that same option was in each member's Gallery atop their list of Albums. However, the option in the main Gallery appears to be gone now (since this Description addition?) along with the "last modified" dates; interestingly, those dates do appear if you go into an Album, click "Sort by date" and then return to the main Gallery. If you're doing away with the Sort option in the main Gallery, could the modified dates appear under the Albums by default? If ever you have the time for that little detail, of course -- I found those pretty useful.
The "News" looks good to me: http://tayle.umd.net. The stores more and more look like their own individual websites, which I assume is what you're aiming for. In fact there are almost no links on that page that even lead back to the main umd.net: just the Cart and Checkout icons on the upper-right, three small ones below the "Suggested Tags", and the tiny "My UMD Account" link at the very bottom (this post made me look at all that).
On this "News" addition there is maybe a little sorting out to do, as it shows up on her Profile under "Blogs", but that link goes to the Blogs section rather than her store's news section (same thing happens on the Blogs listing and Wall). I know you're aware of that, and that it's part of the schizophrenic nature of UMD: members being just regular members and/or store/site owners at the same time. An unresolved set of schisms that's just kind of grown organically over time. Like member's/owner's galleries -- would be nice to just move a site gallery to the store itself, but as UMD's initial concept is all about listing sites, it really belongs here: http://umd.net/site/taylers-tasty-treats (or both places?!?). My head starts spinning on PlanetWAM's (reasonable) request to be able to "link our models to the galleries or single pictures".
Just as a user of UMD, that little mess doesn't bother me at all really. Don't know how store/site owners feel. Probably a Google team would flowchart it and merrily overhaul the whole works, lol. Do they still have that "Don't be evil" motto? :devil: