The 1.10 feedback survey results return from the polls, along with some notes on how I’m handling next steps.
ICYMI there was a survey sent out about the recent 1.10 Logging update to gauge feedback on the new changes and find out what could use some additional work. After the survey closed I went through the results, compiled the most common concerns, and came up with a solution to address them. Thank you again to everyone who participated, there was a ton of written feedback submitted which shows how much you all care about the site! Something I really appreciate.
The Results
The feedback I saw the most was that moving the game statuses to its own tab in the editor only made it more cumbersome to keep track of. After using the editor for over a month now myself I agree. Moving it to keep all the game-specific data together made sense at first but I don’t think it’s worth the hassle in the long run.
While this change was generally welcomed, there were still a good handful of wishes for the play status to also be log field instead of being game specific only. Meaning you could mark any log with played, completed, abandoned, etc… instead only at the game level. With how the editor is setup now I can see the appeal, you should be able to have multiple logs each with their own status as you can abandoned on playthrough of a game while mastering it in another.
I do think moving Mastered to be its own option was a good idea in 1.10’s current state but if I do move to having play status be per log then it’d only make sense to move Mastered back to the play status, essential reversing the original decision.
With these three areas being the highest area of concern, I hope to address them in two phases.
Phase 1: Two Editors
A lot of suggestions were asking for a unified log page without tabs to address the game statuses field being moved, on the other side I also got a lot of feedback of how they don’t even bother with the more in-depth fields such as the journal, play sessions, library ownership, etc.. so merging the two would overwhelm those only looking for the core fields.
Keeping all of that in mind, I ran the numbers on what logging features are used the most and came to the solution of having a default “Quick Editor” with the most essential fields while moving everything else to a “Full Editor” that displays every field on a full page.
As you can see in the bottom left corner, you can easily switch between the two editors at anytime without losing your progress. By default the quick editor will open but there will also be a preference in your settings to change that default to the full editor.
This first phase will only contain UI changes to keep things simple, nothing functional such as adding / altering the logging fields. This will also start as Backer beta feature to get early feedback and test for bugs before rolling it out to everyone. If I can figure out a good system to do it, I’ll also try rolling it out to non-Backer users gradually at random to let more people try it early. The idea here is to prevent a huge impact if something really isn’t working before it gets to too large of an audience, something I wish I did more of for 1.10.
Phase 2: Log Status
Regarding the next two survey results, I want to try moving the play statuses field to be on the log level and combine Mastered back in with the others. When moving a field like this there will be many edge cases to think about such reworking filtering, how to show the status in UI, how to consider stats for profiles / lists, and how will it relate to the overall game-status level we have now.
In a similar vein as phase 1, this will first rollout to Backers as a beta to get early feedback and bug reports if I can.
While these were the most prominent requests from the survey, there are still a ton of other unrelated requests that I’m exploring and will hopefully have news about in the future. But for now I wanted to focus on the core functions of the site and really make sure they’re perfect before moving on.
Thanks for checking in on what’s coming next, as always anything I mentioned here could end up changing once testing things out begins but this is generally what I’ll be working on for the next month or so.
I’ll see you on the site!
MrProg
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