D&D 4E Video Review of the 4E D&D Website

[JVisgaitis]

Hopefully, this will clarify.

OK. Now that makes sense. Kinda like how every person that starts using Photoshop uses lens flares all over the place.

 

[ascendance]

I think the reason to address this now is because they area releasing the new edition. People excited to know more better find a site that can serve to represent the new game. People will want to get information, and when they don't find it, they will be disappointed, and this will fall back on their view of 4E.

And it's getting even more important with their goals of the DDI - the websites have to be top notch to sell this. Even if the content is great, it still needs to be accessible.

Yeah. It's the fact they want to charge for this now that's making people hot and bothered about the poor quality and design of the site. I mean, I didn't care before DDI. I mean, the only way I ever found anything on the WOTC site was through links from ENWorld anyway. But if they do want to charge $15/month... it better be slick and professional.

 

[kenmarable]

I must be retarded, because I never seen anything posted like that. I've seen them say that the DDI was temporary, maybe I just didn't equate that with the main D&D website. In any case, its something that should be fixed sooner rather than later.

If I get a chance, I'll see if I can dig something up. Maybe I'm misremembering since it was from back in August right after the announcement, but we'll see. I am pretty sure that the Dragon and Dungeon portions are definitely temporary, however. Beyond those, the rest of the DDI, all the site really comprises is some 4e previews, which I imagine are temporary, and the minis pages (but I don't keep on news about those).

But I agree, the longer the site goes without improvement, the less benefit they will ever get from it (and potential harm it could do them in some lost customers, but I think it's more of a lost benefit than real harm for them since the site isn't THAT painful compared to many out there).

 

[MichaelSomething]

In order to find the new excerpts, I have to go to Enworld. I can't find them on their site!

 

[HeinorNY]

In order to find the new excerpts, I have to go to Enworld. I can't find them on their site!

I can only find the pregens from D&D Exp if I google for them inside the WOTC site.

 

[(contact)]

I think the really valuable opinions are the web USERS. Yeah, I could dig into their code and design to find some serious flaws, but if the typical web user never notices, then how important is it?

Well, yeah, IA is all about the user experience. It's all about helping people find what they're looking for (and sometimes find what they didn't know they were looking for until they found it).

Of course it's irrelevant to a user if they structure their commenting well to be helpful to later developers, but if they're using poor practices (like the Gleemax site -- rummage through that code for a shudder) it can make the pages too heavy, make searching more difficult, etc.

My take is that any site is like a house, or a meal -- if you have quality at each point of the process, you're that much more likely to achieve a quality end-result.

I love D&D, and I'd love to see the D&D website showcase the fantastic amount of content they have on there. The folks at WotC also love D&D and they totally get it from a gamer's p.o.v. -- they want to put their game online in a useful way, but they don't seem to get it from a web design/development p.o.v.

So how would you change the website to make it more friendly? The thing is, WOTC's website has a lot of content so I'm not sure how much more navigation friendly it can be without expecting the user to have more of a gist of what they're looking for.

I think for purposes of information architecture, I'd start by looking closely at well-designed newspaper sites -- they deal with an enormous amount of content that is constantly changing with repeat visitors looking for new information, and also making return visits for older information.

(I really like the Lawrence Journal World and Guardian Football.)

Then, it would go basically like this:

1. Survey and review users to find out what they come to your site looking for. You can sometimes get good metrics from page traffic and click-through data, etc., but you also have to talk to them to find out what they are there for. Obviously, they can't click-through on the things you don't know you're not doing.

1a. Set your top-level desires as far as what you want to showcase as a business (from here on out, it would most likely be Dragon & Dungeon, new print releases, plus the DDI. Keep it simple. You can't, can't, can't make everything you do top-level content. If you have 15 points of emphasis, you really have no points of emphasis. The current site suffers from this syndrome.

2. Organize everything else by its use, into as few relevant categories as possible, with an eye to how users approach the information (as opposed to how it might be created in-house. Give each one of these top-level menu items its own home page off the site root. (i.e. wizards.com/dnd/player_content/).

2a. Repeat steps 1-2 for each of these top-level topics.

3. Lighten the page load as much as possible. Get rid of the meaningless decorative bling and spend the bandwidth on content-relevant graphics (you've got a truck-full). The page structure can be skinned any way you see fit over time, if you've written standards-based semantic code to start with.

Give your content appropriate column width for font size (for maximum readability -- the ratios are out there) and give your content enough room to breathe.

Group navigation in the same places on each page, considering 1. above -- what are they doing and why? Do they want to go from page to page via search? Put a search function at the end of articles. Use things like "related topic" links -- which could be the top 5 search results using the page header as a search string, for example.

And no iframes. Just don't do it. Don't jam your design into fixed vertical widths. It's a mental artifact from the print world (in my experience), and it just isn't appropriate. The reason their archive lists are in such a tiny font? They are trying to cram a big thing into a small space. Build your layout with the understanding that things will grow.

And, uh . . . 4. Test your new site on a small group of users and find out if all your ideas actually worked.

Rinse, repeat as needed.

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