Hello everyone! I've begun to work on some improvements to the CW shops interface. I thought I'd post some screenshots both as a sneak peek of the revamp and in case anyone has urgent feedback haha. Some parts are going to be really different from what we're used to, so I'm also asking to approach it with an open mind and please don't be too nit-picky with the feedback at this stage, since it's still a very unpolished rough draft.

The CW Feed/Home Page

screenshot

The new page gets rid of the random shops thing, replacing it with:

1. A section (on the left) that list the newest (unlocked) CWs, so that you can see what's been recently released. This is not limited to the shops you follow.
2. On the right side, there's quick links to all of the shops you follow.

On a half-screen view each section moves to full-width so nothing is squished. See spoiler:

screenshot

To go along with this, I'm working on a better search feature that lets you search by wearable layer and other parameters :) That's still in the works though so no screenshots for now.

Next up..

Viewing a CW Shop

I'm gonna use Disasters' shop for these screenshots since she has sooo many items and categories. Here is the current shop, for comparison. The screenshot below is what I'm working on:

screenshot

First, a few key changes/fixes:

1. The "All" category has been replaced with an "Unsorted" category. This category is where you land when you visit the shop's home page, and it only contains items that are NOT sorted into a category.
2. It loads MUCH faster (probably because it's no longer forced to load all of the items in the entire shop)
3. The items are sorted by item ID descending - which means the newest items will be shown first.
4. Each item has the full overlay/preview shown next to it, because let's face it, most of the time you will want to look at all the overlays anyway and so this saves the trouble of hovering. It allows you to see all the overlays you can get at a glance.

Here is what it looks like if an item is locked:

screenshot

Here's what it looks like if you switch to a different category:

screenshot

And just for some variety:

screenshot

Look at my sweet little babies!!!

The Buying Process

I wanted to both streamline and make the buying process safer. We've all at least been afraid of accidentally hitting the back button or double-clicking or something, and buying extra CWs we didn't mean to. Many people have fallen victim to this and so I want to make it so it's much harder to purchase accidentally.

First off, when you click the green "Buy" button, you'll get a pop-up confirmation. If you click OK, then it will go ahead and purchase the item for you. However, it does this using a POST request, not a GET request, and via a secure Ajax call rather than taking you to a new page. What this means is that it's impossible to buy an extra item by refreshing the page or hitting the back button.

One big change is that there is no more confirmation page before a purchase. Instead, you get a pop-up. This is a huge change, but there is reasoning behind it: I'm hoping that this will streamline purchases and allow you to more easily navigate shops (since it no longer redirects you to a different category after purchasing, but lets you stay on the same page you were on).

Okay, so that's that for now!

These changes are mostly focused on the customer-end. The management/seller end of things will get its time in the spotlight soon as well, so please don't worry :)

Please ping me with any feedback you have, things you like, things you might suggest differently, and so on.

You have a good point about the previews. This response is just to let you (and everyone else) know that I've taken it into consideration. I'm gonna explain my reasoning a bit more, because I want you to know I've really given thought to this, I promise I'm not just shooting you down.

The previews being shown, like every major change, has pros and cons. One of the cons is definitely that each item takes up way more space now. It's gotta fit an entire preview after all, not just the image thumbnail. Another con is that, as a result, it'll take a bit more scrolling overall to see all the items on a page.

However my reasoning is that the pros outweigh the cons. The major pros would be:

1. You no longer need to hover over each item to see the overlay, so even if it's more scrolling, this will save you time when browsing CWs. When I hover over an item, it can take almost a full second or more for the hover to load. So if I'm just browsing somebody's shop, instead of hovering for a second over each thumbnail, I can immediately just see what everything looks like on my HA. So I actually anticipate that this will save people a lot of time once people get used to it.
2. Comparison shopping is a lot easier, like if you're trying to decide which recolor is your favorite, for instance - you can look at the two item overlays side-by-side, whereas with item hovers you can only hover one item at once.

I also considered the cons (more scrolling, items taking up more space) and I decided they are not too significant because they're mitigated by the other changes:

1. Changing the items to sort by item ID descending means the newest items are shown near the top. Right now, we are used to scrolling a lot because the newest items (usually the ones we want to buy) are all the way at the bottom of the page. But with the new sorting, the scrolling will be reduced just because new items will be at the front now.
2. Changing "All" to "Unsorted" also drastically reduces the number of items that will ever be present on a single page of your shop, and if there are less items on the page, it's okay for each item to have a bit more real estate.

I hope this reasoning makes sense! And one caveat, well, I said that this is what I'm "anticipating". Based on the reasons above, I think this will be a net benefit, so the previews are a thing I want to proceed with. But of course, if we have them for a while and it's not working out, I'm all for rethinking it and even changing it back based on how testing goes.

Wow that was a wall of text. I am so sorry lol... And also I really hope none of this sounds argumentative or anything, I'm just super verbose no matter what I do T_T

PS. Super, SUPER agree with you on the confirmation pop-ups. Some people argue that they're inconvenient, but when it comes to things you spend real-life dollars on, it's worth the inconvenience to make sure your money's not wasted.

No worries at all! These are great things to discuss and I'm glad for the opportunity to talk about them.

The thing we've always liked about having the CW releaser's HA there is that it gives an extra personal touch to the shop. It's a subtle thing perhaps, but having the HA image reminds you that this is a real person, another user, maybe a friend even, who you're supporting. They put the shop together. The social component of CWs is really important, and that's why we like showing HAs and headshots everywhere, to sort of humanize the shops. Right now I'm not seeing a convincing argument that the trade-off for increased items-per-row would be worth it.

I am hoping that the items-per-row issue will not be as bad as you're imagining. Of course, we won't know for sure until we get to the beta testing stage, but based on what I see on my own screen (and I've been browsing a lot of shops with the new layout that have dozens of items in them) it doesn't seem like it will be problematic.

One thing that will also help with this is responsive design. With the new layout, we can shrink the HA as the width/size of the screen/browser shrinks, and I'm considering hiding the HA entirely on small screens where space conservation becomes more important. It'll definitely be something we keep evaluating as we move forward :)

Hello! I'm back with a couple questions for all of you :)

Number one:

Trying to revise this slightly, what does everyone think of this:

"Notice: If this item is limited due to batches, each invite will count as an item out for that purpose. If you delete an invite it will re-increase your items limit by one."

I think the original wording was actually mostly fine in terms of being understandable, so I didn't change much xD

Number two: As for the issue of perma-retiring items from a CW shop, I don't think that the item would always go back to the item management page, since DTS items bypass that page completely. And I have to double-check if there is still a way to mark an item as perma-retired in our database set-up. I had one idea though, that would work regardless; you know how you write -1 for the quantity if it's unlimited? What if -2 or something meant "permanently retired", and once you set it to that number it's no longer shown in your Manage Shop page by default, and the quantity can never be changed again. I need to talk with the other admins of course about this idea, but I wanted to throw it out there and see what you guys think, would this solve the problem of shop clutter, am I misunderstanding the issue, etc :)

Third thing: So right now the Search page is pretty bare, you type in a term and it finds you items and usernames (?) with that term in it. I'd like to add to this page to make it a viable place to browse and explore CWs offered in the shop. For example, I really want to add the ability to filter by layer. What else might you want to see on an improved Search page? I'd love to hear your ideas.

Gonna reassure you on the loading times - it is sooo much faster than the current shops, even with the previews showing. I've actually been looking at your shop a lot since you're one of the people with a ton of items in there. I'll have a beta up hopefully next week so you guys can see the improved speed first-hand!

Loading speed has been one of my concerns too, so one measure I do take with the previews, is that they're just on top of the regular base (in whatever base color you have chosen). I have noticed that making it load hexes and skins slows it down significantly, and I reason that this specific use case (previewing CWs in a shop) is more like mannequins in a store so they're not as necessary.

If there are specific shops you know of that have a ton of items in one category, feel free to post (or sMail me) the links so I can check them out and make sure the loading speed is still good on them :)

As for the followers page, here's the changes I'm planning:

1. Move the Send Message form to the top of the page
2. Under the form, just show how many followers you have, with a button to show them. It doesn't load the actual list unless you click the button. So like "You have 200 followers. Click here to see your follower list." Then loads the usernames underneath that only if you click the button.
3. I'm kinda leaning towards just... getting rid of the headshots altogether, they take so long to load and idk if anyone actually cares about the headshots staying on that page...

@ Reaper Yes, item hovers will still show the preview with hexes/hair/skin/whatever as usual :) and the items will still be hoverable in the shop, the difference is that you won't need to hover over every single one to see what they look like on your HA at a glance.

Loading times is a very valid and legitimate thing to be concerned about, I don't blame any of you haha. But maybe you'll have to see it to believe it. To give you an idea, Lyonesse's shop which has no items in categories takes about 4 seconds to load if I use the current code, but switching over to the new code it loads in literally less than one second, and that includes all of the preview images.

Tl;dr Trust me. This is going to load MUCH faster than the current shops, and I'm hoping once the changes go out, it will allow people to stop worrying about loading times and just toss as many items onto a page as they want :D

Anyway, MOAR UPDATES

I thought about the feedback you guys (well mostly) gave on the shop owner's HA on the side, and you're right that it shouldn't take up a whole column, so I just moved it to the side of the rest of the shop's header title/text/description. The items shown below get to take up the whole width now.

Sneak peek of the followers page. I kinda like the social/happy feeling of being able to see a couple headshots, cuz it makes it feel lively like WOW REAL PPL FOLLOW ME. The page honestly looks a bit empty without any followers listed - which isn't the feel we want for a followers page. So I came up with a compromise: It shows you your 5 most recent followers, and then has the little "click to load the full list" button :)

5 is a small enough number that it doesn't affect the page load, and if we really need to, we could even cache the recent followers to make it even less impactful on loading speed.

Oh and one last thing, I just pushed an update to make Shop Search stop showing CWs that are priced at zero, and it should be live now :)

All right so I've discussed things with Jessi and gotten more work done on the Manage Shop Items page :) Here's a screenshot of my progress:

Here is the current page for comparison. You'll notice a couple things in the new version:

1. The "enable new item alerts" checkbox has been moved to the top of the page, it makes sense to have it up there since you might have to scroll a bit to reach it if it's on the bottom, and it doesn't take up much space by itself. It fits well below the rest of the exposition.

2. The form for updating the text of your Unsorted category (the main shop page) is tentatively removed. I think it makes more sense for it to be on the Manage Categories page since that's where you edit the description for all of your other shop pages. That's a tentative plan, I'm still open to thoughts on a better organization.

3. While talking to Jessi I mentioned the retirement thing could be -2, and she brought up that it might be confusing, and that many people already find the "-1 means unlimited" thing to be confusing. So I thought, why not make the interface clearer then, no one needs to know if the -1/-2 thing is how it's stored behind the scene. So I've changed the "Amount" input to an option, either enter the number you want (and it must be a non-negative number), or choose Unlimited. There is also a small red Retire button next to each item. This WILL have a pop-up confirmation since it's irreversible and will permanently retire the item. Items you have permanently retired in this way will show up on a separate page dedicated to listing them.

4. Finally there's a couple small UI things, one of which is that the password field is actually a password field now. But the little eye icon next to it can be used to toggle it so that you can see the letters instead of dots to make sure you didn't mistype it or anything.

As you guys may know by now, I tend to get excited over things and just wanna rush through them! But I've been learning that it's worth it to take my time, and make sure things are robust. Hence I just wanna give you a heads up, I am shooting for Beta Testing this in January but it could be later since I want to do a good job rather than rush it. I will continue to post screenshots and updates though to keep you in the loop :)

Hi everyone and thank you for the encouragement so far :D Here is another progress update.

I've been working on the Browse/Search page to make it much easier for you to see what's currently available in shops, and find exactly what you are looking for. For one thing, the page will let you search by LAYER as well as the item name. Locked items will be excluded from this search by default, but you can click the checkbox to include them if you want. Here is a peek of what this page will look like:

The results are sorted newest to oldest, and if there are a lot of results it will be paginated so you can browse them all.

You asked about what the Manage Shop page looks like for limited-batch items. I initially answered that it would be a grayed-out input field. But as the code evolved, it ended up just being a number. Here's a peek at how it looks:

When you hover over the lock icon, it gives you the message explaining that the item is limited and you can't change the amount.

Finally, the feed has evolved a bit. When it comes to CWs, the overlays are what the items are all about, so with the revamp I would like to showcase the overlays where possible. Here's where the CW Feed has evolved:

I know there are concerns about whitespace, but the other version was super cramped-looking and forced you to hover to actually see what the items look like on your HA. I think it is better to show the overlays so you can see at a glance what the new items look like :) And it saves you time spent hovering over the items one-by-one and waiting for the hovers to load.

One more thing! See those "View in shop" links? I know that right now, you guys can link to a specific item in your shop by using the buy link. (That can get a bit dangerous..) In the revamped shops, you will be able to view a specific item in a shop with a specific URL. So there will be a safe way to link directly to a specific item in your shop, to save customers the trouble of searching through your categories and all that. I will have more details on this later :)

New Manage Categories page:

Editing the main shop text (for the Unsorted category) has been moved to this page instead of the Manage Shop page. There's a Preview button as well for your convenience :)

This will be the last update on this for the next few weeks, as I'll be busy with holiday stuff. It's super close to ready for beta testing though so I'm excited :D

Those pages are actually separate from the user cw shops (like they're on a separate part of the site entirely) I agree they should be integrated better and that the payment/create cw page itself could use an update.

If anyone has suggestions for an eventual revamp of this page, and how it could be integrated with the navigation on the CW shops, feel free to leave them here. It will definitely be addressed at some point :)

You're good. Necro here is 15 months.

Also... as for the Retired Items page, neater pagination/sorting will happen! At least, it's on my to-do list! It's just a pretty large to-do list right now, but I just wanted to let everyone know that it's on my list. Some sort of CW search, for just searching your own CWs, would be pretty handy too, no? I got other priority work right now but these are both on my list. <3