New Gallery Look

Andy E

Just noticed that Live Gallery's style has changed so I thought I'd post a thread to see what other people think of it.

From what I can tell, the following has been changed/added:

General changes:

A points system has appeared, along with "Price" information for gadgets (currently all showing Free).
The public name in your profile is now displayed instead of your public nickname (all our gadgets said "Created by: Andy", d'oh!)
The top header of the site has changed
The Gold, Silver & Microsoft badges have changed in size (and look a little old-school aliased, if you ask me) and now link to a help page describing why they're next to the developer name.
A "points balance" link has been added to each page alongside a "Microsoft Points" icon which just links to Windows Live Help for the time being.
The design of Contact Cards for users has changed.
The Vista Landing Page has been updated to show a search bar, gadget pricing information and links to see all Microsoft and partner items or all gallery items.
Search results pages have been updated slightly to show Price information for gadgets along with a few minor design changes.

Main Gallery Home Page:
A "Go Shopping" section has appeared, with "Cool new shops coming soon" in it. Presumably more info on this will show up soon.
A link to the Gallery Forums has appeared, but actually it takes you to an MSN cooking forum!

Individual Gadget Pages:
The layout of the gadget description page has been improved by increasing the width available for text and thus improving readability.
You can now see the rating each user left with their review.
Reviews can be marked as helpful or not helpful (kind of like threads on this forum).
You can no longer review your own gadgets (meaning you can't reply to user reviews).
There's a link to see all reviews left for a particular gadget (before it was limited to the last 30 reviews).

User/Developer Profile Pages:
A purchase history section has been added (and is open every time you load the page, even though it's empty).
Your own developments appear at the bottom of the list, underneath a section with another forum link, this time taking you to an MSN Money forum

From what I can tell, the RSS Feeds haven't changed (no version number/download count) and the gadget submission pages haven't changed.

Personally, I like the new look. It's nicer to have a wider space for the descriptions and reviews. However, I'm not too keen on the enhanced personal feel to it. All our gadgets are marketed as being created by a company, but uploaded using my personal live account. Until now, everything was fine (I don't have a Live Space and my personal profile isn't viewable by the general public) but some of the changes make it look less like a single person has created the gadgets. I'd much prefer the profile image to link to my website, or my support forums.

Other than that, keep up the good work, gallery team.

john-wayne-interessierts

Hello,

Good work Where

This site looks a little bit better, yes maybe. But what about this gadgets and the descriptions

Some Examples:

http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx li=426dc418-12ce-481a-b886-89a66ca9127e&bt=1&pl=1

must be a very awesome gadget, because I can control the weather with it.

Or in other words, the Tag system still sucks, why every fool can add a tag, but nobody can remove it

-I have no actual Gadgets in the gallery, but get the developer a email/Alert in the meantime when someone make a comment

-The Rss-News and other infos about new gadgets are still horrible.

-I still wonder about some gadgets with a high ratings, what kind of web browser the Vista sidebar users use Must be IE 5.0 or something similar, or why there are a lot of gadgets which simple open the IE with a search URL are at the front places Ok, this is my own opinion, sure, but I still wonder about some ratings.

However, new Design Yes why not But there are still many things which makes the live gallery nearly unusable.

Peter

Andy E

All I pointed out was the front-end changes I've noticed, I can't really see what's going on behind the scenes.

While the tag system sucks and anyone can add any tag to any gadget, I'm sure it would be very expensive to hire staff to moderate every gadget/tag that's added. That's what the "Report abuse" link is there for. With the ratings, it's something that's been brought up time and time again. There's no need to wonder about the ratings, they are most definitely being abused. That's why the top rated list is full of eBay search gadgets. You just have to remember that Gallery is still in beta and we don't really know what's going to happen in the main release. For the time being, we have to accept the changes that are made as and when they are made.

In any case, it looks like the current version may be incomplete, as there is a pricing structure, a placeholder for shops and forum links that take you to the wrong place. More features may be coming, it could be that they've released what they've done while they finalize the other stuff.

I don't understand your statement about the web browser. How could anyone on Vista be using IE 5.0 I wouldn't really say that disfunctional tagging, rss and an abusable ratings system makes gallery nearly unusable. Some of our first gadgets still get plenty of downloads despite not being highly rated.

If you haven't already, post in the Gallery suggestions thread. Chris Butler has already replied in there a few times so I'm sure if he sees that it's active he'll have a read and take note of what we say. We might not see suggested functionality added tomorrow, but you never know, it could make it in sometime.

john-wayne-interessierts

About this Tag system, moderation For What A simple "remove Tag" link for everyone would be enough, maybe not perfect, sure, but without a try no one can say this is more worse than the current system.

(And this is not the only MS website with a tag system and this abuse link, which is unusable in the meantime, I am sure MS know this...)

My statement about webbrowser I still don't understand users who fill up his desktop with items which call a website, like this eBay search gadgets. Every browser have a customizable search field in the meantime.

About my answer in general, sorry if the answer annoy you, but I still hope that someone from MS read the postings about MS products, and in the suggestion threads normally no one answer, therefore sorry. Wink

Peter

ToddOs

Regarding not being able to respond to reviews, I think that'll be okay in the long run. The "review" section was pretty broken initially, since it was the only way to have any discussion about the gadget. Now a "review" is actually a review, with an associated rating score and everything. If you need to discuss or troubleshoot a gadget, there's a new link that will take you to a programmatically-created thread on the boards. It's great to see this, and once people start seeing that it's there they will eventually stop using reviews to submit bug reports. It would be nice to have the link be a bit more prominent (I looked right past the link several times before noticing it was there), but I'm not really sure how that could be done. Perhaps moving it up by the "Download" link rather than having it in the "Reviews" tab I don't know, I'm not a web designer.

On the profile link to Spaces, that's always been the case with Live ID cards. The best thing you can do is create a simple Space for yourself which directs folks to your real web page. I think it's great that Gallery is finally using the display name from the Live ID Account rather than from Gallery itself, as my gadgets are finally listed as created by "ToddOs" rather than "ToddOs1".

Overall, I think the changes look great, and I'm very curious to see what's coming with the new Points integration. I'm not sure I'd actually try to sell any of my gadgets, but I'd really like to see what kind of revenue sharing is put in place. Points are granular enough that you can sell for relatively small amounts (80 Points == $1.00 USD) and still make a decent amount of "side money" (for those of us who don't do this for a living, of course).

Andy E

Peter,

Your reply didn't annoy me, I just didn't understand some of it if I'm honest. I get what you're saying about the desktop search gadgets, it's quite annoying that there are several thousand of them on Gallery for eBay and Amazon alone. At the end of the day though, people do download them and use them. That being said, I don't think it's enough people to rate the gadgets to the top of the list Wink

If you allow anyone to remove tags, you're allowing abuse in the opposite direction. People will remove relevant tags for a gadget, or even all tags - then your gadget wouldn't show up in search results. I don't think allowing people to remove tags is the right solution.

ToddOs wrote:

Perhaps moving it up by the "Download" link rather than having it in the "Reviews" tab I don't know, I'm not a web designer.

But you are a web user and there are more of those than designers

Your opinion still counts. However, I think the point of putting it in the reviews tab is that people see it and follow it rather than leaving bug reports in the review section. Still, a link just below or at the side of the download button would be good, too - users will remember seeing this link and visit the gadget page again if they're having problems. The ability to change this link would be great for me, we already have our own support forums.

john-wayne-interessierts

Incomps Creations

While I was initially impressed by the new look, after looking around, I have come up with a few things that I would suggest for the Live Gallery Team versus me just complaining about stuff.

1. Instead of using one larger forum for the gadget feedback, why not give each submitted gadget a forum style feedback / help forum that would simplify the Q&A process as well as allow people to discuss reviews, etc.

2. The width increase has actually decreased readability in some places, specificaly the reviews section where I find myself bombarded by text and design elements without any bounding for the review. A few lines or maybe a box of some sort might help perk that section up a little bit and help it not be such a mish-mash.

3. I realize the tagging system sucks. Why not keep it author controlled given the abuse we have seen already Keep the reporting system open (though we all know how much good that seems to do), but allow the author to have discretion on which tags get kept. I mean, it's not like the author doesn't know what they made, right

4. What is this price thingamijig Are we seriously attempting to sell gadgets or put up a content store through the gallery I can see that getting ugly for regular users really fast if it gets out of hand.

5. Have there been any newly inducted silver medal members lately (And similar to other notes in this thread, why is the graphic so meh )

6. This one is really tiny, but that button on the upper left hand side, right, right, the Live.com button, why is that pixelated You know you can use a .png and IE 6.0+ will pick that up right Or even use a gif or jpg at a decent quality range, should make that button fit in with the rest of the interface.

7. The Live Gallery blog is more than a couple of months out of date, is there somewhere you have been posting

I think that's it for now. I know, I edged in some complaints in there, but hopefully they will consider a few of these points when working n the gallery.

john-wayne-interessierts

Update:

I post a feature request about the live gallery yesterday and get an answer at the same day from the live gallery team.

I assume this forum here is only for development question but NOT for the gallery.

This one is the better place for it:

http://boards.live.com/Windows%20Live%20Gallery%20Forumboards/board.aspx BoardID=1168

Peter

Andy E

UPDATE:

It seems like all the ratings except for the ones left with reviews have been reset. I thought maybe only ratings left with reviews count now Auction Sidebar Tool has more ratings than reviews-with-ratings, so I'm not sure if they've just been reset and are still open to abuse.

I guess we'll see.

Chris Butler - MSFT

Hi everyone.

Thank you for all the great feedback.

For additional feedback we have created a new Windows Live Gallery feedback forum so we don't distract from the specific Sidebar gadget development quetsions here:

http://boards.live.com/Windows%20Live%20Gallery%20Forumboards/board.aspx BoardID=1168

Thanks again!

graham_merton

Incomps Creations wrote:

5. Have there been any newly inducted silver medal members lately (And similar to other notes in this thread, why is the graphic so meh )

just saw this thread and thought i'd say what everyoen else is thinking: how can someone who's clearly abusing the ratings on gallery expect a silver medal for "significant contributions" Wink

i like the new gallery but i'm not too keen on single forum threads for each gadget. i prefer the suggestion of a discussion thread in a section on the gadget page maybe between the reviews and report problems tab

graham

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