More Efficient "Room Map"

mimi078 · 2016-06-23 02:37:59

Sit back for story time, as I have a feeling this will be a fairly lengthy post (for a relatively simple idea). For those who are newer to the site, this story dates all the way back to 2006...

Please read thoroughly before commenting :)

Once upon a time, we only had eight rooms and our doll lived in a modest two-story home.

Life was simple back in the day. There weren't very many stores, but our doll loved to shop and fill her rooms... but one day, she looked around and realized that she was starting to feel a little cramped! All of the beautiful things she had bought were piling up around her!!

Then, Team Feerik introduced a new room! She was so excited, but filled it quickly... and lo and behold, another addition quickly followed! All these rooms started piling up below her house, scrolling down the page for what seemed like days...

Our doll soon realized that her cute little home was getting a little out of hand and it was time to move to a bigger place.

This new house was great, and there was plenty of rooms for all of her things... there were new adventures for her to go on all the time now, and many of those offered her even more rooms. But a few years later, she found herself in the same conundrum and realized that her house was over 20 stories high!

And thus, our story brings us to the present day. Our doll no longer lives in one house, but has an entire neighborhood to explore. We have 100+ rooms, but even our expansive neighborhood is starting to get a little tight!

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fete fete fete
THE SUGGESTION (at last!)
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While our doll's "story" is cute, continuing to expand our "neighborhood" to accommodate the growing number of rooms is getting impractical (our screens are only so big LOL). All kidding aside, the new "neighborhood" was welcomed with mixed reviews (on our site at least).

My suggestion, is to do away with the "view all rooms" tab (and thus, the neighborhood subtabs... sorry developers ~ I hate come in like a wrecking ball with this suggestion), and simply implement a scrolling "carousel" system.

This would eliminate the following problems (that I can think of):
[x] large "neighborhood map" footprint
[x] searching through multiple tabs
[x] increasingly crowded tabs
[x] rooms that are "questionably classified" by tab category
[x] empty tabs (particularly when a doll doesn't have many rooms)
[x] annoying "drop-down" menu feature to access rooms
[x] limited number of possible rooms per tab (based on current dimensions and design)

This would offer the following solutions:
[x] huge space saver, with unlimited number of rooms
[x] only owned rooms displayed
[x] easily viewed 5 room blocks (or whatever the developers chose)
[x] efficient, uncluttered room navigation
[x] streamlined and visually appealing
[x] relatively simple to code
[x] and no future expansions needed!

For those who are unfamiliar with the "carousel" format, I mocked up a sample screen of what this might look like / how it works:

And our dolls lived happily ever after! THE END.

darkelfqueen · 2016-06-23 22:33:26

hmmm. That does make sense. I do agree that some of the rooms are grouped under questionable themes and that means us having to click on each theme tab to find the room.

The only problem I'd have is I don't remember the names or even the looks of some of my newer rooms so I tend to look under the theme for it. If I can't search by theme, I'd have to hover over each room till I find it.

hmmm.. I have a feeling both solutions should be merged somehow.

janghyunae · 2016-07-09 23:18:56

Honestly, I somewhat like the "themed" display... I like how you have all those tabs, to be very honest, especially considering I only have up to 2 rooms per doll ahahahah

However, I do understand your pain but I'm not sure I would suggest such a thing.... Right now, you can have up to 121 rooms (yes, I have counted them). Can you actually imagine a horizontal scroll through over 100 rooms? That's quite a lot, in my opinion.... Plus, you'd lose a logical structure between some rooms when they have a pre-made theme...

What I think is that we somewhat have way too many rooms as a way to hide the fact that we have way too many items. Sure, it's somewhat of a trophy as to how much time we've been here, how much effort we've put into it. But also, having over 20 rooms makes us think "this is just another item" and you shove it to create yet another scene. I really believe that this is way too much and it ends up creating too much of a mess in terms of organization. Sure, a person is free to let their imagination run loose and make a use of all those rooms. But it's kind of too much...

We could suggest, tho, many other situations:

_ A room for organization (as in, imagine a really big closet with a lot of doors and drawers, each of them with a certain category such as dresses, shirts, walls, etc etc and clicking a certain door/drawer would lead us to the set of desired items. Pretty much like the "My things" tab but in an actual room - that could have the horizontal scroll, for example)

_ The option to choose the map view (current) or the horizontal scroll (the one suggested by mimi right here, being that this one would only show the owned rooms)

_ Less rooms (there, I said it)

_ Naming your rooms (and being able to search them, regardless of the displaying system, by the given names)

_ imma think of some more...

Announcement

#1 2016-06-23 02:37:59

More Efficient "Room Map"

#2 2016-06-23 22:33:26

Re: More Efficient "Room Map"

#3 2016-07-09 23:18:56

Re: More Efficient "Room Map"

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