As you may know I’m working on a big redesign of the site it’s coming along nicely and I’m taking this opportunity to redo some pages which I think don’t quite work at the moment.
The Character Tracker is a really popular page on the site, but it’s a bit slow to load and quite bloated with so many characters, most of which you may not be interested in.
I was just wondering some general ideas as to how you use the page and what you’d like to see if I change it.
For example, I could let you “track” certain characters and then only those characters will appear here (or maybe on the homepage), and then have the option to click to see all characters.
There will also be the option to choose favourite characters, which will work with the Recommendation Engine later, and rate them too.
I am also toying with the idea of further down the line adding notifications if a new story is released that features characters you are tracking (optional, of course).
What if the initial page didn’t show any characters, but was a page where you set options for media, range, type of character (doctor, villain, companion/ally), and had options to narrow it down further to specific characters, and then when you hit Search or Filter or whatever, it showed only the characters you’d narrowed it down to?
Then you only have to calculate stats for the characters the user filtered down to, and rarely have to do all of them.
I love the character tracker! It’s one of my favourite things on this site.
I’ve mostly been using it to see how the numbers go up on characters while I’m making my way through classic who and to discover which characters also had appearances in the spin-offs. So, mostly I’ve just been looking at the tv stories part of the tracker since those were my main focus.
Oh, and actually I have a suggestion for that, though I have no idea how easy or difficult this would be to implement, but I think it would be helpful if the different types of stories had a different page each. That way (if I understand correctly) it also wouldn’t have to load everything at once, and if I go back from having looked at a character’s TV stories, I wouldn’t be on the all stories tab again.
I’d love to have the option to track a few characters specifically, and to have favourite characters.
That sounds good from a development perspective but would be annoying if people had to constantly choose filters and stuff. Which is why I thought of letting people choose which characters to track - they can appear at the top, and then options to find others below. And maybe still a “show all” button for impatient people!
Thanks that’s really nice any other ideas?
Yes I could make it like that, it would definitely speed it up!
You could have it remember the last settings you left it on, so that you’re really just changing them the first time you go there, or if you want different filter settings from the last time you went to the page.
Right now, it’s defaulting to all characters, all media, which not only is probably the most that has to be done on the back end, but not usually what I’d want to look at anyways.
Though, honestly, you could probably just add a second set of tabs below All/TV/Audio/Book/Comics for Doctor/Villain/Ally and only show one of the three sections at a time, and only compute the section it’s currently showing. Defaulting to Doctor would give you a lot less characters on the front page, too.
Also, how about making your own user page a bit more of a hub that you’re going to revisit a lot?
Have sections on the users user page that shows any specific characters that they are tracking with the stats, any sets they are tracking with the next story, stories they haven’t completed or rated, etc…
You could probably get it where people are repeatedly visiting their own user page instead of the character tracker.
Some people actually do visit their own user page a lot to see some of the buttons like “Not Completed” - I’m going to be adding those to the homepage because I want to make it easier for people to get straight to the content they want without having to click lots of times
Another thing I’m going to be adding is better “onboarding” with signposts to all the features, and even a “missions” area where you can try them all out.
Lots of people don’t seem to know all the features available
Oh I dunno, sometimes it’s fun to learn about new things you’ve never noticed.
I’ve take a quick look in the Character Tracker, and it’s pretty neat. Though it does have the unfortunate side effect of reminding me just how much material I’ve never seen/heard/read.
It does have all the menus there, but I am thinking just having some of that showing right on the page directly would be nice. I’m just thinking you go there and it immediately tells you the next stories in the collections you are tracking (not like the huge section on the home page, but little indexcard like boxes or such), shows stats on the characters you are tracking, submission status on any edits or quotes you put in, etc.
And also lets remove all the padding, since there are huge gaps between practically everything on that page.
(Of course, you could probably merge the user page and the home page…)
Nothing much to add other than just loving all the ideas people have said so far
Also if you’re having it that you can get notifications when there’s new stories with characters you track on the site, would that also be something you could add with Sets and Ranges?
it’s coming along nicely and I’m taking this opportunity to redo some pages which I think don’t quite work at the moment.
any other ideas?
