Hello All,
I’m liking most of the new site layout changes. I have a few suggestions for your consideration:
- Add a page to list all shows in your catalog. (Not sure if anyone else used it, but I much preferred a listing of the animes available along with the type(subbed, dubbed, HD)) Currently in the new layout, you are able to search, but there isn’t a good way to figure out if the show is subbed or dubbed until you actually click on the show. Having a listing of everything was still more convenient for me.
- Keep a history of what you have watched. It would be convenient to have the site remember what episode you last left off on. When visiting the show page, it could suggest to resume at whatever episode you last left off on.
- On the show pages, just show the episode descriptions by default. I don’t really see much point to having the episode descriptions hidden by default. You have the blank space there available anyways.
- On the show pages, instead of having a drop down menu to toggle between subbed and dubbed, just have the episode entry have a link to either of the versions. (You may also want to extend this functionality to support addition language versions of the series as well (e.g. Elfen Lied))
- For any of the places where you can toggle between subbed to dubbed or any other language, change them from a drop down menu to just a toggle button. (Really, this only saves you like one click, but nevertheless a bit quicker to switch between versions.)
- When hovering over the show images on the ‘Watch Anime’ page, display the series description in the tooltip popup along with the image and title. This will make it easier to, at a glance, determine if the show is something you are interested in watching. (Other pertinent info may be subbed/dubbed status, number of episodes, next episode release if it is a weekly released series, & your progress through the series…)
- On the ‘Watch Anime’ page, maybe add a link to “see more of X genre” links at the bottom-right of each block if there is more shows. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that there were more shows within that genre until I noticed that the genre title was actually a link. (A simple arrow would also work.)
- Be a bit more mindful of responsive design for screen sizes. Some parts of your website scales great between small and larger screen sizes, but some things are just static sizes, causing it to be rendered larger than the actual screen size.
- On the front page, make the scrolling banner larger. People like the larger scrolling banners! (Think hulu.com)
- Proofread / Check the links on your FAQ pages. (The page seems to have been updated last June. Since then, some links have changed and are not pointing in the correct places. (e.g. Some forum links to closed threads.)) Additionally, MANY the links seem to be broken on the FAQ page due to an incorrect encoding of the URLs. (e.g. “https:%20/forums.theanimenetwork.com/faq”, the first forward slash after https…)
- On the schedule page, the icons for guest vs premium do not display on the default calendar view. It was not obvious to me that I needed to click on each “Details” link to display the episode and the status indicator icons or to switch to the list view. I would think it would be better to just display the episodes being released on that day, instead of having to click on each individual show link.
- Have the ability to turn-on/off auto-play when watching a series. By default, when an episode finishes, the website will automatically start playing the next episode. It would be nice to have this feature turn on/off for those people who want to only watch only an episode. (I was watching an episode while on a laptop with 4G capability. I stepped away when the episode started playing credits and came back about 20-30 minutes later to find it was playing credits again for the next episode! Luckily the new player cached the episode… so I didn’t waste any of my data plan!)
- The auto-play feature seems to pause after 2 episodes of continuous play or so… it won’t go eating up all your data automatically!
Hopefully all that makes sense. Let me know if you would like any clarifications. I’d like to know your thoughts on the suggestions as well (and/or if I am completely missing the point on something). Feel free to discuss other suggestions for the new site as well.
Thanks.