Archive for April, 2009
April 27th Release Notes
Hi Everyone,
Nothing really major went in this build… we were taking a pass at a lot of backend performance issues and tweaking some sub-systems that drive large areas of the site… as well as tackling some residual bugs (cross browser compatibility and such) from the recent homepage and nav changes.
Next week we are planning some new features. The NOW page… that was discussed by our Creative Directory in the blog recently… and some additional enhancements to our social media feeds.
Here is the full list:
gamerDNA Site Navigation: Redux
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Sean Duhame, Creative Director at gamerDNA and known as Alphadoque in the gamerDNA community.
We’ve done a lot of work at gamerDNA since its launch almost a year ago. We’ve added a ton of product features, over 60, some massive… and some not so massive. We added these features alongside an already fully developed Web site, gamerDNA’s former incarnation GuildCafe.com. The site simply… grew!
We’ve also learned a lot in this past year. Much of that learning has come from the feedback of our members and visitors, not only by direct contact but also by site usage data we check to measure how much you really care about a feature or particular part of the site. We talk a lot about this feedback in the halls, lunch room, board table, desks and chat clients at gamerDNA. All this feedback, wide and varied, lead us to ask ourselves one simple question. The teams answers to this one question were simply all over the place. It was a sober moment… but most moments worth-while are. Oh… the question? We’ll get there 
If there’s one thing I can say about this crew is that when a question is posed there’s no length to which we won’t go to answer it. For example, I’ll never forget Trapper and Antares drawing graphs on the white board to support their ideas concerning ethical utilitarianism (yes, I am serious). So when we couldn’t get to the bottom of "the question" many long discussions ensued. Let me just say this, there’s a lot of passion at this company!
For guidance we turned to what we’ve learned about gamerDNA.com since its launch again relying on our members and visitors to show us the light. When we juxtaposed that knowledge against the site (as it was only a few days ago) we realized gamerDNA.com just wasn’t playing to its strengths. It wasn’t telling its story. It was over-complicated and tried to be too many things and needed to be simplified. There’s still a bit of that going on but we feel we’ve moved in a direction, first with the site navigation and the (logged-out) home page, that helps solve those problems.
John Maeda’s "Laws of Simplicity" state, "The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction." Reduction is a difficult process when it comes to the things you love but we’ve done our best to be pragmatic and give meaning to the reduction we’ve chosen. There’s no greater example of this reduction than our new site navigation. We realize it’s an enormous change for our members and visitors. We appreciate that change can be a less than fun process but it’s our belief that these choices will make for a much more valuable, fun and usable experience.
SITE NAVIGATION BREAK-DOWN
I wanted to first share our "NOW" location so I can give you the entire picture. It hasn’t launched yet (slated for delivery Tuesday, May 5th) but please feel free to take a look at the screenshot to get an idea of what it will offer. This page supports a few things we learned from our members – that real-time feeds around games, game content and conversation as well as the ability to have a broad view into the activity of the community is very desirable amongst our members. We’ve put a lot of focus on the real-time nature of this page as well as the conversational aspect of the system. We’re very excited to launch this and we’ll be looking into how well it’s received by our members and visitors.
GAMES & PLAYERS
I’ve bundled these together because simply put, there is no gamerDNA without the two. It’s why we’re here and we’re pretty sure it’s why you’re here too.
The Games and Players navigation have consistent use patterns. Top level links will bring you to powerful directories for each. Future vision for Games and Players are a landing page for each that bubble up high-level, interesting, timely content.
Within the drop-down menu we track your last 5 visited locations for each, both Games and Players, and add them to the menu. We did this because we learned that members often go back to the same game and member pages within lengthy blocks of time. There are numerous use-cases that support this choice. We really believe you’ll find this pretty useful.
As Web users we find the type-ahead function to be unbelievably useful. Quick, easy, helpful. If you have a game or player in mind, typing in the first few letters for either will deliver you the closest matches in less than a second. Again, we found a lot of use cases that this feature supported. We all find we’re using it a lot already.
MEMBER NAVIGATION
What a simple question. Like I said, we all came up with different answers. We’re now doing our best to rally around one. Development continues but we want to deliver improvements as they come because in the face of a little confusion we feel you deserve the enhancements as they’re completed. Changes our coming fast and we’re pretty sure you’ll be happy with what’s to come.
Lastly, some of our members have wondered quite a bit as to why our forums section was moved outside of our main site navigation and into the footer. Let it be said, we adore our members who use the gamerDNA.com forums. This was a very difficult decision, one we spoke of at length. Please read Community manager Sam Houston’s post for more on this choice.
Respectfully,
Sean Duhame
Creative Director, gamerDNA
How to start a conversation on gamerDNA
At gamerDNA we’re quite simply trying to build a community for gamers. A place for gamers to easily share what they’re playing with their friends, share cool screenshots, a place to join in and find interesting conversations about games, and even a place to discover new games that you’ve never heard of before. To reflect this desire to bring you better and better content, we’ve made some changes to the site recently (and more are coming in the near future) to help make all these things easier to do and make them happen more often.
In this article I’d like to focus on how you can use gamerDNA as a platform to Start a Conversation about gaming. There are many ways to do it, both manually and automatic, and we will detail them here.
1. Creating a Game Post or Game Activity
The first page you see when you go gamerDNA.com when logged in is a page we call your Member Home. Your Member Home is a way to see what all your friends on gamerDNA are playing and what they are talking about, and easily jump in conversations with them.
Here you see what my friends have played recently and the Game Posts that they’ve made, as well as a way that I can add a Game Post or Game Activity myself.
With the "Your Games" drop down (or the Other button), you can easily add a game activity to your gamerDNA. This enables you to quickly tell everyone at gamerDNA what game you played, when you played it, how the game made you feel, as well as tell everyone what you did in the game via the text box.
Game Activity posts are also automatically created when you add your Xbox Live, Xfire, or Steam information to your profile. Please go here to add that information to your profile.
If you would like to create a Game Post, which is similar to a blog post and enables you to write at length about any game, you can click the "Create a Post" button.
This will open up the Game Post screen here:
Here you can put in the title of your post, then all the text of your post. In the post you can share links with your friends, news, write about what you did last night in a game, ask questions of your friends, etc…it’s all up to you! Below that, you can attach the post to a Game or many Games so that your post shows up on various game pages on gamerDNA, as well as shows your friends what games you’re talking about. And finally, you can tell everyone how the game made you feel and then nudge all your friends to check out what you posted.
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We have also updated the site navigation to make it easy to add a Gameplay event or Game Post at any time on the site. All you have to do is mouse-over the DNA symbol in the top right corner of your screen and you will see several options drop down (Shown Above).
Whenever you create any content on gamerDNA, whether it be a game activity/game post or a screenshot..or even when you see someone’s stuff and you think it’s cool…you can always "nudge" your friends to make sure they check it out!
The nudge system allows you to quickly send out emails to all your friends that will tell them to check out what you’re looking at. This is a great way to get everyone to check out what you just made, or invite everyone over to check out something cool that you found from another community member!
3. Comment on other community member’s stuff!
Almost everything on gamerDNA is able to be commented on and we actively encourage you to do so! If you found something cool that a friend did, or maybe you want to chime in on someone’s tale of their epic gaming session last night..you should do it!
All of the comments that are made on things always notify the author of the content via email notification, as well as anyone else who has commented before you. This is a great way to keep up on the conversations that you have joined at gamerDNA.
Everything that is shown on your Member Home can be commented on right from the page, all you have to do is click on the Comment button. This opens up a little box where you can type in whatever you want to say, then just click ADD COMMENT to send the comment.
When you’re looking at your member home you will also be able to see some comments from others on your friend’s activities. This is a great way to keep up on conversations that are happening on the site.
You can also comment on the individual pages for each post/image, as well as see the entire conversation. Here is a great example of a conversation that is being had in our community around a Game Post.
4. Find conversations!
gamerDNA is a very active community and people are talking about things all the time, all you have to do is find a conversation to jump in to! You can do this by going to your Member Homepage, going to your friends’ profiles and checking out their activities on their Game Calendar, or by going to a Game Page (you can view our Game Directory here)
We’ll be adding more and more features to gamerDNA over the coming months, all things that we think will help you keep up with what your friends and the community is doing, and have conversations with other gamers. Everyone on the gamerDNA Staff is very excited to see how our community jumps in and uses these new features and systems!
We also have a blog post up here, by our Creative Director Sean Duhame which helps explain our new site navigation and even gives you a sneak peek at a new page called the NOW page..a new feature which should help you find even more cool things happening on the site, in real-time!
Sincerely,
Sam Houston
gamerDNA Community Manager
April 23rd Release Notes
Hi Everyone!
This is a pretty big release for gamerDNA… not neccessarily because of what it is in it, but because of the shift in philosophy it represents for the next few months.
You will see the site start to reflect a greater desire to use your gamerDNA to bring you better content. This includes connecting you with people similar to you, allowing you to find and engage in more gaming discussions, and discover new games that you might not know about. The first step in this journey is repositioning the main areas of the site that we want to focus on… these are Games and Players. You will see these featured prominently in our new navigation:
Both the games and players lists will track your most recent views and keep them their for easier access… the GAMES and MEMBERS drop down will also remember your last choice… making it easy to find and jump to various people or games in the site.
There is also a new logged in navigation that gives you faster access to your member home page (with all of your friend activity), your public profile, and your DNA. Click any of these icons to go there.
In addition to clicking the icons, if you hover over HOME, any guilds you belong to on the site will appear, and hovering over DNA gives you quick access to add content to the site.
As many existing members will recognize, there are far fewer links in the nav… but they are all still available as a footer at the bottom of every page:
We also tweaked the DNA home page to clarify the various sections available:
You will now see sections for Broadcast settings (Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed) and Quizzes… as they were previously in another spot on the site.
Specifically for broadcasting, we have made some enhancements there as well:
Broadcasts are broken up into Daily and Hourly summaries. Your daily summary is all of your game play activity. this includes automatic data pulled from your networks, but also manual game play you put in to your calendar. There are also hourly site activity summaries for various things you do on gamerDNA.com.
Lastly, we have a new homepage that is showcasing the type of activity we are getting from the community. We will be using this data to bring more interesting content to all users as we roll out some new sections:
Check out the full list of stuff!
April 6th Release Notes
That time of the week again!
We are working on some pretty big changes to the site… changes that will roll out in the next few months. So the over all volume of the weekly builds will be a bit smaller, and focus on bug fixes and small enhancements that we can roll out independently. In the end though, we are driving towards a pretty massive revamp by the end of July. More news on that as it happens, as it will impact almost every area of the site.
In the meatime, some fun features this week:
Nudge your friends!
When you are creating content, or you see interesting content on our site, you can now nudge your friends to view/contribute to it. Nudging brings up a check box to select your friends… they will all receive an email prompt to view the content.
Play games and have them tracked!
If you play games through gamerDNA, your game pay is now tracked and added to your activity. If you close the window (by hitting the X to close) the game play activity will be generated instantly. If you close the tab or window by using your browser, it will take up to 60 seconds for your game session to expire and the activity to appear in your feed.
Looking for games to pay?
Want to try out the new play tracking? You can view them in the Directory.
Here are some recent ones people have played:
- The Chronicles of Spellborn (PC)
- Moto Rush (WEB)
- 3 Foot Ninja (WEB)
- 9Dragons (PC)
- 3000 AD (WEB)
- Seafight (WEB)
- Doom 1 (WEB)
- Sonny (WEB)
- Ragdoll Avalanche 2 (WEB)
- Thing-Thing Arena 3 (WEB)
- zOMG (WEB)
- Flash Element TD 2 (WEB)
- Kongai (WEB)
- Minions (WEB)
