MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

flumbo · 02-19-2007, 06:05 PM

Unfortunately, Connect is more concerned with style than usability. All those little frames and scrollbars everywhere drive me nuts. You have to open the application window to exactly the right height in order to use it properly. Here's some feedback I sent to them a few months back (yeah, I know too long). It would be nice to know someone over there is actually listening to their customers...

Please group books together that are part of a series or at least try to upsell them to me.

When browsing the store the first few times I missed the "1 of 17 Next" area at the bottom of the results pane. If you don't have the store full-screen it is easy to miss.

This little scrollable frame is very frustrating to navigate. I can't use my mouse wheel to scroll. I can't use my arrow keys to scroll. I can't use the space bar to go down a screen. I can't use pagedown to go down a screen. The only way to look at more than the five results you show is by grabbing the scrollbar and dragging it with your mouse-- not very functional or user friendly. What's wrong with treating this as a web page we can scroll through? Seems to work great for Amazon.

For instance, look at the book "Dune House Harkonnen" by Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert. The description of the book gives almost no information about the plot. The author information has these strange mini scrollbars you have to use to read one more line of text about each of the authors.

Couldn't you just loosen up on the page length restrictions and let the user read that additonal line of text? Clicking to "read more" gives the user more information about the author, but it doesn't have any paragraph breaks. Instead it is just a dense block of unreadable text in another tiny scrolling area of the page.

Please include some information about the book on the "browse" screen. Right now you only show the title, author, publisher and category. I already chose a category, so that isn't needed. I don't choose books by publisher.

There's no information about the actual subject of the book unless you click through to a new page. Then, once again, you have to drag the scrollbar to read the synopsis even if there is still plenty of room.

02-19-2007, 06:05 PM	#4
flumbo I got nothin... Posts: 127 Karma: 302 Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Hawaii	Unfortunately, Connect is more concerned with style than usability. All those little frames and scrollbars everywhere drive me nuts. You have to open the application window to exactly the right height in order to use it properly. Here's some feedback I sent to them a few months back (yeah, I know too long). It would be nice to know someone over there is actually listening to their customers... Please group books together that are part of a series or at least try to upsell them to me. When browsing the store the first few times I missed the "1 of 17 Next" area at the bottom of the results pane. If you don't have the store full-screen it is easy to miss. This little scrollable frame is very frustrating to navigate. I can't use my mouse wheel to scroll. I can't use my arrow keys to scroll. I can't use the space bar to go down a screen. I can't use pagedown to go down a screen. The only way to look at more than the five results you show is by grabbing the scrollbar and dragging it with your mouse-- not very functional or user friendly. What's wrong with treating this as a web page we can scroll through? Seems to work great for Amazon. For instance, look at the book "Dune House Harkonnen" by Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert. The description of the book gives almost no information about the plot. The author information has these strange mini scrollbars you have to use to read one more line of text about each of the authors. Couldn't you just loosen up on the page length restrictions and let the user read that additonal line of text? Clicking to "read more" gives the user more information about the author, but it doesn't have any paragraph breaks. Instead it is just a dense block of unreadable text in another tiny scrolling area of the page. Please include some information about the book on the "browse" screen. Right now you only show the title, author, publisher and category. I already chose a category, so that isn't needed. I don't choose books by publisher. There's no information about the actual subject of the book unless you click through to a new page. Then, once again, you have to drag the scrollbar to read the synopsis even if there is still plenty of room.