I am a bit resistant to change, but I wanted to take a few moments to really look at the new design. After spending a few moments, I just couldn't see how lumping everything together makes things work better. So I looked for places to provide feedback. It's going to be tough to do even that.
While reading through this thread, finally the walkthrough came up. Why it wasn't easily found in several other places makes me wonder what the hell they were thinking, but okay, there is a walkthrough. So I watched the walkthrough. Early on he mentions things that that were intended goals. Like "First off, we wanted to make a much more visual exciting experience." "We also want to make it easy for you to search for the content you want." "we also want to make the whole experience faster. Make it easier for you to bounce from place to place on the store." "And finally we wanted to bring all the content together in one place."
Somewhat decent goals, and not easy to balance. But when comparing my experience with the new store to my experiences with the old store, I am pretty sure that I would say that they failed.
They have new backgrounds and more visual pop, then just having single backgrounds or a blue screen everywhere. Which is nice, but I don't really need the backgrounds. Still there are other changes that supposedly help. Large boxes for some games, small boxes for others. Multiple backgrounds that sometimes are a focus on the games and movies currently displayed in the area you are viewing. The different boxes aren't very helpful, looks more like a sloppy clutter then a place where I am trying to look for particular titles. In general, they should have done the new backgrounds in the old design.
When it comes to searching for content. The old store was amazing for browsing, though it was getting a bit overdone with some of the sub categories. The new design pretty much requires you to use the search because you aren't going to like seeing everything on the store to get to anything you are looking for.
This is probably my most important point about the differences between the stores. Average users probably would browse through the old store up to an hour each week. A half hour for games, and a half hour for movies, not counting download time. Other users would probably log in, quickly search the new releases and then finish, taking about 10 minutes. On the new store, it really seems like people will go to the playstation blog, or to the forums or to the game websites for the games they are interested in to find what they want, then they log in to playstation store, use the search function and find it in about half a minute. Start the download and exit as fast as possible. The new design is not really entertaining for browsing. I would bet that most people will be spending much less time in the store because they just don't want to look through the clutter.
They wanted to make the experience faster, well, they technically succeeded. As I said just above, people won't spend as much time on the store. But that only means that they won't be doing as much in the store as they used to. That doesn't really mean a faster experience, just that they don't want to use the store for everything that they did before. Doing one thing in half the time that people would do 5 things in kind of means less efficiency, not just less time. As for bouncing from place to place in the store, it didn't really seem very quick to me, even when trying to disregard the longer then usual load times.
As for bringing all the content together in one place. They did that. It kind of screws up the whole make it visually more enjoyable, and make it faster, because you have to go through so many more things that aren't what we are looking for.
I will miss the old design and probably will do as I said where I find what I want without the store and only use the search function to get what I want. I am pretty sure that I will spend less time using the new psn store compared to the time I spent in the old store.
If they had the chance to track the stats on the issue, hopefully the figure out people's average time in the old store, and compare it to their average time in the new store. I wonder if the difference will favor the old store, but if it does, hopefully they make another update to repair some of their changes and actually make it more enjoyable to use the store.
