New PlayStation Website Launch Woes

PlayStation.com launched a new website and updated the forums, but not without hitch. In addition to the extra unexpected maintenance, and stability issues, there have been many complaints about the design of the site, removed features, and slow performance.

Design

There have been many complaints about the design of the site which has gone from dark/black to light/white. However many sites, including Google, use black/white/blue themes. But I guess PlayStation found a brighter white.

Apparently the N4G.com uses a different white than playstation.com. Link

Features

Many are complaining of lost features (which there are; perhaps removed due to limited benefit with high cost to forum performance). However, numerous times the moderating team has stated that MORE features will be available, including quick reply. But why isn't quick reply enabled now? Quick reply would give the already vocal negative users an even easier way to spam their distaste for the whiter white that PlayStation.com uses. Expect that feature to come later down the road.

Performance

Other complaints include poor website performance. One user of the forums attributed some of the load issues to large background images, a couple of which exceed 1MB in size. With most modern browsers and internet connections, this normally wouldn't be an issue, thanks to caching. But some are trying to access this site from underpowered machines or cell phones.

Some of these challenges stem from the sheer size of the community, where not only is it impossible to please everyone, but the large amount of traffic generated. This traffic isn't always apparent as a lot is generated by guest users and what little is actual member traffic is spread out amongst many forums.

What will be fixed

Overall, the forums have only been re-opened for less than 12 hours at this point, and the issues are constantly being worked on, and we'll see things changed based on user feedback.

Here is a short list of some things in the forum (including the Lithium platform as a whole) that have changed based solely on user feedback in the past:

  • Forum width
  • Specific ranks
  • Forum games
  • Specific boards (such as tech central and PlayStation gallery)
  • Specific forum programs
  • Forum features (improvement to forum messenger)
  • Forum design

Share : Comments(1) : 1970 Views : Feb 28, 2010

Boo
Cloudy Blue or it goes back in it's hole again and puts the lotion on it skin. <--- Scratch that. I mean. I bet everyone would be very happy to have the cloudy blue skin as the default.

Mar 02, 2010 by bignfat : Reply

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