Redesigning the D&D website

[cthulhu_duck]

As one of the people who works on the D&D website, I’ll toss in a few reactions.
...
We’re always open to good ideas.

Is there any chance you could optimise the file size of some of the larger (>80kb) images on the site so that those of us on slow connections (56k) can access the site more quickly?

 

[WayneLigon]

That is a very nice design. It looks clean, useable and interesting.

 

[Hambot]

Chibbell's redesign excited me.

All of the tension I usually feel when visiting the WoTC site, the fear that there was something there that I really needed to read, but was probably cleverly hidden from casual view, melted away. This was a design that I intuitively understood. I had a strong urge to start clicking on things, even knowing that it was a mock-up. Now that's powerful.

Philosophy is as powerful an influence as design competence--this I know. But philosphy can be changed by the right person with the right vision and the ability to make others see it. I hope, for the sake of my favorite hobby, that the right person exists.

This is how I felt too. I cannot say it any better than this.

To WotC: This mock up has everything your site has currently, but does it all better. How is this vision incompatible with your current vision when it is just strictly better?

Everything here is the stame stuff, but it feels like it is done right. Bigger pictures. Readable text. More art. Useful descriptions.

My eyesight is not great. On the web I have to hold down control and use the scroll mouse to make all the text bigger. Just try doing that on the current website and see what happens. Telling me that there is conflict between the websites multiple masters doesn't adequately explain to me why the current design does not let me read the front page with the big fat text I need. And if one of the current priorities is to minimize downwards scrolling - drop it. That is the enemy of people who need large print to read every where.

It just makes me so sad and frustrated when I compare the web stuff with the page spreads for the 4th edition books that are so clean, elegant and gorgeous.

 

[Chowder]

The web team wants one thing, the brand team wants another, marketing wants a third, and corporate tosses in a fourth. Everyone knows what happens when an elephant gets designed by a committee. No one gets everything he wants; it’s all a compromise.

While one can argue that the opinions expressed on the ENWorld boards may not be representative of those held by the general public or D&D fans at large, I think it's very telling that the vast majority of the reactions expressed here are decidedly negative towards the quality of the existing WotC site. The web team, brand team, marketing, and corporate should realize that their compromise has produced a materially sub-standard site, and they should reconsider their positions.

-Chowder

 

[Raith5]

Steve,

Chibbell's redesign excited me.

All of the tension I usually feel when visiting the WoTC site, the fear that there was something there that I really needed to read, but was probably cleverly hidden from casual view, melted away. This was a design that I intuitively understood. I had a strong urge to start clicking on things, even knowing that it was a mock-up. Now that's powerful.

Seconded!

This design is much more accessible and engaging IMO.

S

 

[Kzach]

No one gets everything he wants; it’s all a compromise.

Then it's threads like these that should be presented to the committee. In all the threads I've seen on this issue, and there have been many more than just the two on EN World and Dragonavenue over the years, I've seen the vast majority were very negative about WotC's site design.

I think it's plainly obvious that your fan-base and primary target market are generally avoiding the site because of it's bad design. The committee should pull their heads out of their bums and realise that what they're doing is not working and never will.

The web-design team should be a separate entity not beholden to the whims of other divisions. It's there to do a vital job as a part of the corporate structure of the company. It is not an add-on, it is an integral part of the whole.

Show them these threads so that they can see that change isn't something that they should probably consider, but is something that is imperative for the company to be successful. The web pages of companies are the primary access points for most people these days, and yet are often treated as little more than the dog's breakfast.

First impressions count so you can only imagine how many people are being turned off D&D every single day, just by the website alone. And imagine how many voices are not being heard, simply due to the fact that they never become part of the community because of the poor design of the website.

If departments other than the web team want their voices heard, then they should do it through submission to the web-team and the web-team should be the decision-makers on how to implement those voices. Currently, all we're getting is a garbled mess of people yelling at us, and so none of the voices are being heard at all by those who need to hear them.

 

[Mottokrosh]

If departments other than the web team want their voices heard, then they should do it through submission to the web-team and the web-team should be the decision-makers on how to implement those voices. Currently, all we're getting is a garbled mess of people yelling at us, and so none of the voices are being heard at all by those who need to hear them.

Hear, hear!

As someone who makes his living through his website, I couldn't agree more.

 

[AllisterH]

Ok, what am I missing?

I honestly don't see what is making everyone go ga-ga over...

 

[ZwergWade]

I posted a comment where the design first appeared, but I'll copy it here --



As one of the people who works on the D&D website, I’ll toss in a few reactions.

First, this take on the website demonstrates what can be accomplished by a single person working toward a single vision. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with the D&D site. It serves many masters, and they all get a voice in how it’s put together. The web team wants one thing, the brand team wants another, marketing wants a third, and corporate tosses in a fourth. Everyone knows what happens when an elephant gets designed by a committee. No one gets everything he wants; it’s all a compromise.

But second, yeah, we do pay attention to things like this. We (the web team) have looked at this build and tossed it around a bit. There are things we like and things we don’t, as might be expected. But no one dismissed it out of hand. We’re always open to good ideas.

Steve

Usability serves no master, it serves anyone.

 

[Tao]

I posted this on the other thread a little while back, and I figure I should cross post, since this seems to be the more active.

That's actually a very good revision, though I actually have some minor issues with the redesign as well. I've actually put a lot of thought into the Wizards site myself, since I was once an admin WizO and did all the design work for a major WizO intranet site that tied into the design of the rest of the Wizards of the Coast site. The site never launched due to the shift towards Gleemax taking the forefront of the Wizards online initiative and the adjustment in the way the WizO team was organized (which meant eliminating the Admin WizOs and whatever projects we had going all together), but the time spent on the project left me intimately familiar with the overall site structure of the WotC pages.


First, allow me to say that as harsh as the original video review was... it was pretty well spot on and a little more gentle than I had been in the past. There are a lot of other issues that could have been mentioned, including w3c compliance, branding, and organization/hierarchy, but for the most part it hit the most important ones.

That said, I do have a few issues with the new design as well...

All articles are created equal
The new site makes no distinction between the different types of articles, and offers no obvious filter for selecting a single article type. Theoretically this could be done from the Archives page, but theres no reason to limit usability in that manner. A single line of links below the "News and Features" header that read View All | Dragon | Dungeon | etc... and operated some AJAX style filtering code would be the easiest/least obtrusive manner to add that to this design, but there are other ways to do it that might be more integrated into the site (personally, I would like to see the different article types branded with a specific logo for each at some point).

Really thick header and masthead
That big masthead area looks great on the front page, but would be far too large for subsequent pages. Eliminating them entirely would result in fairly boring pages, but there isn't any way to really scale them out properly. Your options, then, are reduced to an entirely different header structure on backpages (less than ideal and a bit jarring in transition) or a slightly modified design that would place decorative elements in less valuable real estate. Using your World of Warcraft example, Blizzard uses far narrower headers to announce new articles (on the main page) or highlight the key idea (on back pages) while moving much of the decoration out of the primary text column.

Black text on a white background
Tiny black letters on bright whiteness is hard on the eyes (not any worse than what they have currently, but certainly not an improvement). Designing towards readability, especially on a website that tends to favor large blocks of text, is very important and was something that was missed. That said, it is a bold contrast against the primarily red and black, so design wise it is definitely your best option, but usability will suffer.

Looooooong for a front page
While I admire the effort into making the article stubs legible and interesting, they stretch the page out far more than it needs to. The goal of a front page is to direct traffic where we want it. If the user has to scroll too far, it might be easier to just go to the archives to find the desired article. As an example (again, using WoW's website to illustrate, since that's familiar to the both of us), about half of the page content displays within my monitor (that is to say, that I only have to scroll once to view everything). This is about the same case as Wizards current design, and tends to be about the desired length for most of my own work as well. In comparison, only about 1/4 of the D&D redesign shows up in my monitor. That means a lot of scrolling, and more than likely, a loss of visitors who are too lazy to dig that far (you'd be surprised).

BRANDING
The biggest problem with your design is branding. It's a great looking site on its own, but held up next to the actual D&D 4e paper products, the two have very little in common. One of the major draws of the WoW site is the fact that the website is consistent with the look and feel of WoWs graphic interface. The same should hold true for D&D's site, though at the moment its looking like something of a messy combination of 3.5 and 4e. The redesign looks like 5e .

Be that as it may, I really do think that the redesign is an improvement, though there are areas that I think it could have gone a bit further even. Just as an intellectual exercise, I would almost like to throw something together to see what I could do with the D&D site... and I have the rest of the day off anyways... I may be back...

I still do work with the Wizards of the Coast online team, though not in the same capacity as I used to, but I'll definitely do what I can to make sure that these complaints don't fall on deaf ears. At least on my part, I will always be championing a better site design.

I definitely like the concept, and the design is pretty good. To me though, it was still lacking in a few areas... the biggest of which being branding. It looked like an awesome D&D site, but it didn't really look like anything we've seen from 4e. As a result, and because I had some free time on my hands, I threw something together that used your site as a basis but fixed the couple of issues that I came up with, focusing primarily on branding.

I'd be interested to hear what you think of it:

http://www.mattylee.com/images/designs/dd_redux.jpg