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I have suggestions to the Weasyl dev team and I wonder if others agree! by betsy
Heya dudes!
So this is just kindof a random thought(s) and I'm planning on bringing it up with the developers as well as the forums but wanted to talk about it here too.
Since I post pretty much exclusively to Weasyl now, I'd love to see the site improve and bring in a wider audience!
I really LOVE Weasyl for alot of reasons, and really enjoy the customizable experience too. To be completely honest, I think my only real complaint is that the initial set-up of the pages is a head-scratcher for folks who are new to the set-up. The image bars at the top are cluttered and confusing at first glance. Like...wait, are those faves my images? Oh wait, no they aren't lol. It trips people up I think, including myself. It looks like needless clutter and redundant waste of space.
I still think that FA's/DA's page set-ups are the best...not just because it's familiar to me, but it's really simple and easy to browse. You get your Featured Submission, then your Recent, then your faves underneath, Journals to the right, user profile at the top. With Weasyl's set-up I could very easily see the profile info at the top with folders instead of submissions lined up right under that! I think it would look really good...and more straightforward, and still classy and unique imo.
Second thing that I'd say is to not enforce the collections thing so much. Users who only have commissions to show probably really enjoy uploading vs. just asking for collection requests because it feels more like their own page and their own content. I dunno, it's a cool thing to do but most commissioners are used to uploading their content and giving the artists due credit. I must say I don't mind this at all. I feel like weasyl is very artist-friendly but not as much general user-friendly which in turn can hurt our potential audience.
Have some-drop menus for when uploading submissions that have basic species, themes, media, etc... yes I know, just like what FA has. I'd be more apt to tag properly if I had more pre-conceived tags to click. What I do like about Weasyl's tagging system is that you can type in infinate tags yourself as well as give other people the option to tag your work where you may have missed a detail.
Have an "autotag" or "autofill" type thing like what they have on Twitter when if you're sending a collection offer to someone. Sometimes I send off collection offers and have no idea if they even reached the member. I could have misspelled the user, sent to another person with a similar usertag, or something and I'd never know lol I'd love to see a little drop menu appear with people's avatars for added security.
What do you guys think? These are some things that I think could be improved and make people more likely to use the site. I'm no expert! Just a fellow member!
NEVER FEAR! A FOLLOW-UP "WHAT I LIKE ABOUT WEASYL' JOURNAL WILL BE POSTED SOON
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Comments
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That would be really cool actually! I like getting notified of things like that. I miss birthdays and opportunities for drawing giftart ALL the time.
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Yep, and I usually have a bad memory of birthdays, unless I wrote them down in advance elsewhere. But that usually means asking people, which is both awkward and potentially gives the surprise away.
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That would be awesome!
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Oh I'm glad somebody else has thought of that besides me! I was just thinking it the other day.
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For the collection thing, I commission a lot and I don't mind it. To be fair, I don't typically upload commissions I get which I know isn't as common. Plus it helps reduce bloat. That said, it's very well possible that I get a commission from someone on FA/DA/Whatever and don't realize they have a weasyl account, so I miss out on the collection part. So kinda see both sides of it.
I'd also add the suggestion of being able to view who favorited your stuff. Right now, I don't think there's a way and that seems quite silly. Unless I'm missing something.
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I disagree with most of those things. First of all, so far Weasyl's best feature is that it's not FA or DA. I don't see why it has to become more like them. At first I found the whole "images on top" thing confusing too but now I think it looks almost like a fun permanently changing header. I think anyone who has been on a site longer that half an hour can get used to this arrangement.
As for collections, I don't think they are enforced too much and I think it's a good thing. It's an art site. People are here to share art and to follow art. I am actually a little irritated by collectors accounts of FA and here - I always have to check if the uploader drew the picture I like and then I can expect similar pictures from them and follow them or they are just making a digital scrapbook. There are tons of sites to share art you didn't create (tumblr, pinterest, blogger) and only a handful of art sites. Users who only have other people's art to show shouldn't feel like it's their own content because it isn't, at least not in the context of an art site. Yes, they purchased it, but do you bring a base you bought to a pottery exhibition?
I really dislike FA's dropdown system. Most of the time I draw humans, it's tiring to be scrolling through a ton of species to pick this category over and over.
An autofill for usernames could be good but I dislike autofills for tags - I have to wrestle with tumblr and DA tags every time I tag something. For example, if I have an OC called Justin both sites instantly start calling out "Justin Timberlake" and I have to press enter/spacebar really fast to move on to the next tag before they do it.
Generally, I hope that Weasyl is going to move in a direction of a general art site rather than a furry site. Right now it's hard to make my friends join it because they expect it to be a second FA. And the main page doesn't do a good job at disproving them right now...
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*vase not base
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Haha well I wouldn't go as far as saying that I'd like to see this site become more like FA or DA because that would be silly and unimpressive. However, just from observing alot of people's response it seems that the submission/faves bars are not a fan favorite. Personally I wish there were a better way to display my folders vs. having to browse behind the main page. But I digress...it isn't about making this site exactly like FA sign of the cross, it's about taking things that have worked well for other sites and building from them. Again these are only opinions! I'm chill with Weasyl and their practices and that's why I'm still here and nowhere else XD
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Oh, another cool thing would be if they adopted a drop-down menu for tags is if it highlights frequently used tags and filters...kindof like DA back in the day.
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Speaking from a website designer's perspective, a website that needs users to acclimate to its design is more likely to lose potential (and current) users than acquire or retain them, especially if those who already use the site hear from casual or new users 'I don't go there because the interface is hard for me to follow'. And this is what I hear from a lot of my commissioners. They may not be giving it 'the time it needs' or whatever you want to call it, but regardless of how fair the general public is being, you can't control their minds and it does affect how likely the site will be to gain new users and even keep older users. Given what the majority of people who haven't stuck with the site normally say, it would probably bear suggestion that the site's current design is confusing first and useable later, but short of having less visible drama, never is Weasyl declared to be 'better' than other sites, and 'better' is what most sites should aspire to be in order to be recognized and appreciated for its potential by the general public. Not to mention I've seen a number of individuals say that Weasyl doesn't need to change because it's better than other sites as it is (without justification as to why) and that the users just need to learn how to use it. Pushing an air of elitism on the matter really doesn't make the site look any better. Having a unique design compared to other sites also doesn't make it more useful.
Weasyl is most often trying to convince people that know how to use a different site that it is more useful than 'that other site' is. It can't do that if it's confusing them right from the index page.
Weasyl also has the opportunity to make an impact right away by simply listening to the most common complaints and responding to them positively. This is something all the other sites fail to do. DA doesn't listen, FA has no functional renovation staff, IB seems slow about theirs and SoFurry changes things no one asked for. So Weasyl could benefit from simply making the most necessary changes as requested, even if it's only on a per-user-preference basis by way of configuration. Such as all of the very clear complaints about the thumbnail system.
A site that intends and expects to be useful should accommodate the average user. That includes the less technical, those with poor eyesight, those with lower-resolution devices, those who use televisions for their computer monitor, those who don't use the site for more than five minutes at a time, those who use the site for hours at a time, the 'at a glance' users, etc. So the simplest solution is to provide the users with functional settings that change the appearance to their liking (for example, changing where items appear when they visit another user's page or how large and what format thumbnails take) and providing them with an easy to understand means for configuring it. It calls for memorizing a few more details in the database at the benefit of increased user activity overall due to accommodating the broad spectrum of end-users.
I'm interested in a site that allows me to take full advantage of my screen real estate, provides me with a dependable place that I can post art without unnecessary drama, and doesn't confuse my buyers, friends who I link to the site, or other casual users who want to know if they should follow me or how to commission me. Right now the site only does one of these three things.
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Good suggestions! I especially feel ya on the collections issue. A lot of commissioners get a lot of joy from posting the works they've paid money for.
I'm still super getting used to working weasyl, but I'm definitely liking the improvements.
Especially the option to choose what you see from people you follow. Being able to choose whose Journal entries I receive makes it possible to actually read through them!
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I agree with all your points and want to add an idea.
The possibility for sections/tags for badges, icons, ych and other common types of pieces would be rad imo. It might be more appealing to have a shopping like experience or see works by multiple people while browsing.
Same idea could be applied to collections. Kind of like "hey here's my badges!"
Like I said just spit balling lol. That's something I thought of proposing myself, but I have no idea how hard that would be to code.
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I'd have to agree with the theme idea. Weasyl could certainly use something like that as an easier way to browse for art.
And i agree; i like uploading commissions i get ^^
serves as advertising for that artists X3 -
100% yes on the species etc. thing, i've nagged about it before and it was said to be the top feature request
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I can get behind BASICALLY all of this.
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I dunno, I kind of like being just able to fill out your own tags rather than using a drop down box for species/gender/media etc.
But I see a lot of people don't use tags as much as I, maybe promote the use of tags more?-
Oh I do too! My lazy-ass wouldn't mind a list of commonly used tags to click to reduce redundancy when typing the tags out XD
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I think one way to make what you are looking at on a person's page less confusing, would be to move the label for it to the top, or top left. The majority of us looking at this site are trained to read information from top right to bottom left. So, coming into this site for the first time and looking at an individual's page, you just see a bunch of pictures, and then whether those are submitted by the individual or favorites is the last bit of information you are processing initially.
It's easy to acclimatize to this, given a little bit of time, but yeah, people don't tend to like to acclimatize. They want to come in and like everything about a site when they first go there, and if they don't, they will tend to go somewhere else, unless there isn't really a decently used alternative.
And with a personal complaint/suggestion;
I do really wish Weasyl displayed flash things on the actual submission page.
Having to click a separate link to view the content of the flash, a small link at the bottom of the cover image that could easily be missed, is inconvenient. It actually brings the user away from the submission page too, removing the individual's ability to favorite or comment on the same page where they can actually see the content of the flash file. -
As far as the collections thing goes... hey, at least they allow people to upload stuff they didn't create to their gallery if that's how they want to roll, despite the collection system existing, which kind of baffled me.
Personally I think the best system would be to do what Floof, that FA-alike that Eevee left to create and then gave up on, was going to do: Allow commissioners to upload it directly to their collections, and then if the artist shows up to upload a copy later, automatically detect the duplicate and offer to have them "claim" it, so there's still only one copy between them. Right now I'm seeing cases where the commissioner uploads something to their gallery and the artist puts it in their collection and I'm like, GAAAAAH NO THAT IS LITERALLY BACKWARDS
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yeah, I certainly didn't mean "enforce" in terms of rigid strictness but I know they'd RATHER commissioners use the collection feature instead ;D
OOO I like that autodetect thing. See this isn't me wanting weasyl to be like all the rest, it's just me hoping they take what's worked for folks on other sites without directly copying it, if that makes any sense really .
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I myself have gotten used to the setup of Weasyl, but what I really want, is the ability to change the display order. FA doesn't do it, and so for The Beach Bears I had to put in a navigation bar (which FA has, but did not suit my purposes, being a musician) and is not necessary in Inkbunny, since their folders are not only customizable, but create their own navigation bars. SoFurry doesn't really require it either for similar reasons. Weasyl needs that, not only for my stuff but any artist which creates serial work.
The dropdown idea for tags is not bad, but I hope they don't do it the way that InkBunny did, where the suggested tags don't show up until you finish a tag (which seems senseless) and then covers up the followup box. One of the problems The problems I have with FA's dropdown is that it may be fine for artists, but in the seven years I've been posting music on FA, they have done nothing to improve the audio dropdowns. Such an easy fix, and they have done nothing. Inkbunny is clearly aired toward furry artwork, forcing you to put in gender and species, which I always put in male and bear, but which makes no sense for a song. SoFurry requires you to put in commas, while Weasyl turns every space into a new tag, which means if I put up something that is "Easy Listening" both give me a problem.
I agree with you on the Collections thing. I've found it pretty useless, and wish that they had a Collaboration thing, which would have one page showing as many people as you like as creators. That way, any comment or fav would show up on all of the creators' pages, and everyone gets equal credit.
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Honestly a drop-down menu can get alittle bit cumbersome and strange. I do really like the fact that you can chose your own tags I think that's really awesome! I also like the idea of some commonly used tags as well to cut down on redundancy while typing haha. I do enjoy the collections feature honestly, but I kindof speak for commissioners in the regard that it isn't keen on everyone. Thanks for the feedback!!!
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Hey, no problem. It's clear that a lot of the development work is aimed towards single creator with one or more commissioners. But even artists need collaborations, as many have one who does the line work and another who does the coloration and shading. The idea of the collections was primarily to save database space. If they could figure out a way to create a collections/collaborator combination, that would be awesome.
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so basically you're kinda asking it to be FA without it being FA :P
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Haha I never said that! yes I admit the page set-up for FA is the easiest for me to navigate but FA is painfully primitive and you can't customize folders like you can here!
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Eeeh, I don't fully 100% Agree with this stuff. I love the collections feature, I just think that people should have the ability to request a collections offer which I already suggested to the devs and I was told is a feature in progress. There is something on Nabyn that fills that gap between which I think is pretty awesome. They have a character gallery feature in which you can upload other artist's work to but you must give credit in the process of uploading it and it will never appear as only "your own".
Example!
Character Gallery:
http://www.nabyn.com/character.php?id=804Uploaded by Artist:
http://www.nabyn.com/art/plugtor-and-blrglgood-59095Uploaded by Me:
http://www.nabyn.com/guestart/1809/It's too bad that site will never get out of beta and up and running.
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Ooo I do like that Nabyn feature you're talking about. I actually really like the collections feature myself but alot of commissioners don't necessarily care for it I've found. Artist to artist relations seems pretty legit while artist to commissioner relations almost seem back-door-ish? This is just my honest opinion though, I don't speak for all commissioners :3
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I haven't heard anything ill about it from my clients yet and I commission a lot of artists as well myself but haven't had a problem with it either, but I can see when people are used to just uploading how they'd be lost....but that is kind of because FA doesn't really have a good system for it right now either imo. It causes a lot of confusion when looking through people's galleries and when I have uploaded other's art I get the same confusion on there. I definitely think adding a better looking option for uploading and adding to collections would be the best plan of action similar to Nabyn. I sent this post to the Director so he could see (and share with the devs) your suggestions and those in the comments to remedy this issue as well! c: They're definitely interested in working more on this stuff themselves.
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I don't like the collections feature either, at least in the current state. It makes us commissioners feel like second class citizens (which I guess we are) :P Submission folders is a nice feature, but why force separate Submissions, Collections and Characters 'silos' on top of that? These three should be part of the submission tags or categories instead (collection changed to 'commissioned work'). And of course I have to mention the squared thumbnails which are bad for art browsing.
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I totally feel you there!
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I agree with Noodle. I think it should be a hybrid of Weasyl, Nabyn and DA. Nabyn allows a complete in-depth biography and color codes for your characters, and allows you to search by characters. That kind of background info and color sampling is essential to commissioners as a reference sheet to hand to artists. Also, Sketchbooks are a separate area to keep all of your unfinished art, searchable and watchable, and you can design a button skin for it. Everything is customizable at nabyn, from the header banner to the wallpaper, making it your own unique space.
Weasels folder system needs to be like DA. At weasyl, there is a number limit and i cant make folder icons like DA allows. When the folder is open, i should be able to write about that specific gallery inside for visitors to read, but we can only do that at DA as well.
What i do like about weasyl is that the first thing you see on an artists page is their banner and then a row of artwork so you get a basic idea of what that artist draws before continuing further down the page. Collections are really hard to accomplish if someone doesn't look at Weasyl often and leaves the request pending. I feel that there should be an easier way to accomplish this. If i commissioned the art, i should be able to immediately add it from my gallery to my collections, exactly how faves work.
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Oh, I have another suggestion.. please show all the folders on the main page, I don't like the rotating folders idea. I submitted new art to a folder, but the folder its in doesn't show up on my page. So if someone wanted to see more of that character, the folder wouldn't be there for them. Let me pick the folders I want to feature on my page or show them all. :|
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Link
Mirumoto_Kenjiro
One thing I've been thinking about for here (& FA) that's needed are birthday notices, like on dA. That way people will know when someone's birthday is around the corner, and perhaps enough time for friends to scribble out quick birthday gifts.