DriveThruRPG Is Having A Facelift

If you head over to DTRPG, you'll see a link at the top to a 'sneak preview' of a new site redesign. For certain values of 'sneak'.

 

[MNblockhead]

Hmmm... looks the same to me.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Hmmm... looks the same to me.

You get 80 columns??? Luxury.

[Sent from my Commodore 64]

 

[Igor Mendonça]

What they could really do is to put some effort in the Windows app and the mobile website. I have more than 2 thousand* pdfs there, and it is just useless to explore my own content via Drivethru native support.. I'm actually starting to upload my PDFs to Evernote, in order to use tags and infos that I can use to search thereafter.

* Mostly free and PWYW content, which means that these are extremely diverse in theme, system, format, etc.

:/

 

[Ruin Explorer]

As a product manager, I'd be really interested in the data around engagement on all the features they decided to keep. Like WHY did they decide to keep the horizontal scroll? Best practice on most ecommerce sites now is a gridded vertical infinite scroll (for example, the Gap); or descending into catetories. Current experience allows you to have gridded, "see all", or even just text links. They removed this functionality in the new experience. Did they A/B test into this new experience? I'm very curious.

Is "Bestselling Titles" really the most important thing to keep that the top? And then to have the very confusing "Most Popular under $5" right under - is that also really the 2nd most important thing?

Does the context change when someone is logged in as opposed to not logged in?

Why don't I see a "deal of the day" when someone comes to the front page?

My final point here - this only seems to be a redesign of their front page.

So many questions, so much opportunity. This actually looks a lot like they just updated the CSS (mostly); without actually altering much of the underlying functionality or conceptualization of the shopping workflow. As @Jd Smith1 noted, unless a lot of the feature logic (including search, for me too) is improved, shade me also as unimpressed.

(Ok, I also did a search, using EN Publishing as an example. Not an improvement)

Yeah pretty much all of this.

DriveThru needs an actual, proper update. Not just some vague aesthetic improvements. They basically need a do-over at this point, because as others have said, the current site is pretty much a twenty-year-old approach. Can it really be that unprofitable that they can't afford that?