New Shop Page!

Discussion in 'Official Announcements' started by Andrewsimonthomas, Jan 26, 2017.

  1. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    This also assumes that customers don't stumble on a designer's Creations pages via the profile link. The Creations pages are a jumble of products and designs that defy any explanation as to order of appearance and they also have no ability to sort contents in any way. I'd be interested in knowing what the long range plans are for the Creations page, if any.

    I could envision that a sort link from a shop page would transfer you to a sortable Creations list, and going to a "shop view" from the same pull down sort list would bring you back to the shop pages. At least that would make the Creations pages somewhat useful plus it would allow the people who want to micromanage their store curation to have that ability. In addition having an optional way to weed out products from the Creations list and only show public products not for sale would also be a nice touch.
     
  2. Bathsheba
    Bathsheba Well-Known Member
    Shapeways, we need a commitment from you to bring back sort options. Not having it isn't OK for shops of any size. It doesn't work even for those of us trying to maintain them, and certainly won't work for shoppers.
     
  3. 908280_deleted
    908280_deleted Shapeways Employee Product Team
    Hi!

    Will be brief - we've heard your concerns and we understand them completely.

    We will make Sort Options as they worked before available under the new shop design.

    Our desire was to clean up the shop layout wherever possible but in doing so it seems we went one step too far and we are eager to correct that by making sure you and your customers have the ability to find exactly what they're after.

    All the best,

    Hunter
     
    Silvergence_Karen likes this.
  4. Andrew_Forster
    Andrew_Forster Well-Known Member
    Cool, thank you!
    I guess sometimes changes need to be taken in smaller steps :)
     
  5. Bathsheba
    Bathsheba Well-Known Member
    <3 <3 <3
    (Text search within a shop would be one more step on the stairway to awesome.)
    <3 <3 <3
     
    coines23 likes this.
  6. Silvergence_Karen
    Silvergence_Karen Active Member
    Thanks for making the shop pages mobile-friendly! Since Google’s made responsive designed pages more or less mandatory it’s a relief to know our shop pages will have a shot at being found when a prospective customer searches. The text, products & avatar all look great when squished down to a tiny cell phone size but my new 1600x320px banner is not responsive, the sides are cut off. Was that an oversight that will be addressed? I can play around with the banner design to get one that will fit a cell phone screen but since I’m old school & love my honkin’ big monitor, getting it to also fit & look good on a large screen will be tricky! One size doesn’t really fit all & there’s a tradeoff between good design & forcing something to fit every screen size imaginable! I’d love to know the stats regarding customers using cell phones vs monitors.
     
  7. MichaelAtOz
    MichaelAtOz Well-Known Member
    I think there is still a problem with the new size.
    Scaling.
    My monitor is 1920x1080. (not the biggest nowadays)
    What follows are a shop (Peter your link was the closest I found in this thread), viewed at different window sizes.
    Small, until just before the wide banner gets cropped; there is a horizontal scroll bar.
    Small, until the h.scroll bar disappears.
    Big, almost full screen, how I typically look at a web page when mostly single tasking. (full screen capture)
    Big, full screen.

    Thumbnails, click to enlarge.
    (the first two are just the viewable window, at full monitor height - so minus the Firefox title bar, menus, tabs & status line)
    new shop small scroll.JPG

    new shop small no scroll.JPG

    new shop almost full.JPG

    new shop full.JPG

    Notice how except for the first step, there is progressively less product displayed.
    Normally when you enlarge a window you get to see more, not less.
    I'm about to upgrade to a higher res monitor, then it will disappear?

    So, I thinks to myself, zoom out...

    new shop almost full zoom out.JPG

    new shop full zoom out.JPG

    Nope. Just more wasted whitespace...

    I think,
    a. The banner should not scale too much larger than the shop text, eg to something a little bigger than the second one above, this will stop it gobbling up all the vertical space,
    b. The number of columns of product should increase when there is space available. At the moment the left & right whitespace just grows.

    Also, people should preview their shop text line breaks at various window sizes.
     
  8. MitchellJetten
    MitchellJetten Shapeways Employee CS Team
    upload_2017-2-15_9-29-28.png
     
  9. MichaelAtOz
    MichaelAtOz Well-Known Member
    ? was that just to show the 'sort by'?

    It is interesting how it consumes even more vertical whitespace, pushing product images further out of view.
    Perhaps it should be at the top of the left column above 'all items' thus not chewing up vertical space?
     
  10. MitchellJetten
    MitchellJetten Shapeways Employee CS Team
    Correct, was to show the sort by is back :)
     
  11. Oskar_van_Deventer
    Oskar_van_Deventer Well-Known Member
    Hurray, sort is back! Thanks for the quick turn-around on that one.

    Oskar
     
  12. MichaelAtOz
    MichaelAtOz Well-Known Member
    Well I just opted-in...
    Was it always the case that the public shop shows the first image, not the default image? Or is that a bug?

    Also, as I bitch about elsewhere, how the hell are we meant to describe closely related things in the text width restricted by damn ...,sure use it when scaling down, but LOOK AT ALL THAT WHITE SPACE WHERE MEANINGFUL INFO COULD BE DISPLAYED...
    New shop title width.JPG
    new shop default image.JPG
     
  13. MichaelAtOz
    MichaelAtOz Well-Known Member
    Edit view says "The highest priority image tagged with your default material (this is your “default image”) will be the first image most shoppers will see when viewing your product."
    It appears that "multiple options shown" assumed that the default material is one of them perhaps?
     
  14. railNscale
    railNscale Well-Known Member
    Well, we have adopted the new shop layout.
    Is it an improvement?
    Not really.
    The banner is way too large, you hardly see any products. It doesn't matter what size of screen you use: the banner is way too large. The awkward circular thing in the middle is consuming a lot of space of the banner. The sides of the banner are cropped.
    Basically the banner is like the image.

    BannerShapeways2017proporties.jpg
    The blue part is visible in all cases. The red sides or parts of it get lost if you're working with small screens. The red bit in the middle can be blocked by the avatar-circle. The yellow bit will never be visible due to the avatar-circle.
    Not to mention the enourmous white below the banner that makes your product images dissapear.

    So the SW team made the following possible:
    1. Blocking a lot of your product images due to the giant banner
    2. Possible blocking parts of your giant banner, so that your design needs to be squeezed in the blue zone.
    3. All shops look similar due to the very dominant circle thing in the middle.

    It has nothing to do with improving your webshop layout. The banner size is annoying. Your webshop cannot be personalized because you have to work around all the fancy-proportiona- squeezing-stuff that propbably displays the enthusiasm of nerd who doesn't care a bit about the functionality of the website. The functionality is less. You need to scroll more.

    As soon as you view a single product, your webshop logo gets lost.

    But this all these remarks were already mentioned in detail in this thread. So why doesn't Shapeways listen to these valid remarks?
     
  15. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    Don't blame the poor nerds slaving away at their computer terminals! Credit should always go to management, either for not properly specifying what they want or not supplying enough time and resources to get the job done properly. The nerds are simply pawns in the game of 3D printing.

    It is possible that there is a longer range vision that requires temporary deficiencies in banner display until they can get around to getting things working as envisioned. Or they just didn't realize what was happening and will get around to better banner scaling with a future update. Sucks to have a full size banner in the meantime.

    I'm not sure what the banner is now meant to hold. Is it supposed to hold the store logo now that a discrete store logo is being phased out? If it is why put the designer profile image right underneath it? I don't see IBM changing their logo to have an image of their CEO underneath it, and partially obscuring the "B" with the CEO image. And on a product page there is no banner or store logo but just a designer profile image near the bottom of the page. I simply don't see what Shapeways is trying to accomplish with these changes except that it is all being driven by an attempt for compatibility with mobile devices to drive up overall sales volumes and that's more important in the near term than things such as proper banner scaling, etc..
     
  16. railNscale
    railNscale Well-Known Member
    Well probably you're right reagarding the managers, or some other decision maker.
    SW however has the habit of introducing gimmicks that must have been invented in complete isolation.

    I just noticed that the new shop page design has no +Follow button anymore.
    Is that intended? Probably not.

    It would be nice if that was fixed. Also all other remarks made in this thread should be adopted in some way. The current design is not ideal.
     
  17. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    I'm still trying to figure out how to adapt to this. Personally I think having a shop name different than my user name no longer makes any sense. The shop page banner area would be too busy and cluttered with both a banner with a shop name and an overlapping profile image.

    Perhaps jewelry or underwear designers can benefit from name branding in addition to a store branding. Often times using a designer name as the store brand also makes sense, as in "Calvin Klein." But for my stuff here on Shapeways? Who gives a hoot if the designs in my store are designed by a MrNibbles? Probably no one. The only thing I care about is that people can remember the shop name or part of it so they can find it in a search.

    From the forum I understand that the user name can now be changed, so for me changing MrNibbles to Nibbles and Bits makes some sense. The only drawback is that the top of the shop would say "Nibbles and Bits by Nibbles and Bits" which could look sort of stupid. Ideally I'd be able to click an option to not display the "by Nibbles and Bits" part, or the software would auto detect when the user name is the same as the shop name and only display the shop name.
     
  18. MichaelAtOz
    MichaelAtOz Well-Known Member
    Make/My-Shop/Shop-Settings click on the banner
     
  19. MichaelAtOz
    MichaelAtOz Well-Known Member
    I suspect they're Geeks, Geeks are good, helpful people. I blamed the real cuplrits on page 1.
    edit/ But if they let the Geeks do the G.D., then yes the managers need a good talking to... /edit

    p.s. I'm a Geek
     
  20. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    Ha ha. I did a search using "nibbles" to see if all the searches would still work with that variation. Looking at the shop page results I saw this image which is wrong. A few weeks ago I was experimenting with different profile/banner images and I must have tried this banana image, but obviously something hasn't updated or been refreshed somewhere. It could be in my browser I suppose. I will need to clear out the cache or check on another computer to see if it's at my end. Strangely the Designers tab shows the correct fish hook image.

    nibbles search.jpg