This week was busy for Dreaper. We made a decision on which flow to work on last week and we need to finish designing its details this week. The design team had several meetings and broke down the product into parts and discussed the details together.
One problem we found that’s hard to solve was the metrics for trends. We only had data of accumulated downloads for each mod, not how many downloads per day. (We are gathering that data by making snapshot of the data every day now, but a lot of history data will be ignored.) In this case, if we want to use downloads as metrics for trend, it will be confusing. If we use number of mods made during that month instead, it does not make sense on the “Creator ranked by downloads” page. We decided to remove the trend bar on the creator page, to make things clearer.
Another problem we tried to solve is to make better use of the space on the webpage. Our client was interested in the top ones, but we also think it would be good if he can see a list of recommended ones on the right, to show him more information at once. Right now we put top eight on the left and the remaining of top 50 on the right as a scrolling bar.
Besides that, we found our web scraper broke when modthesims updated their website. We lost several days of data and our programmer had to fix the scraper according to the update. We made several design decisions around that. One of the most important ones is that for the top mods, instead of the new data we gathered, we decided to switch back to accumulated downloads, but let the scrolling bar recommend the top mods for last week, so that if the scraper breaks in the future our client can still see the history data, which reduces some risks.
We discussed our design decisions to our client and how to deliver with our client and his comment was that everything looks thoughtful. We arranged a playtest session next Monday. We’re looking forward to it!