• 3Oct 08

  testing UE tagging

  test
  • Posted Oct 3, 2008 2:27 pm GMT
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• 8Aug 08

  Nearing Beta's End

  GameSpot Wide's public beta will be ending late next week and we'll be moving the new design over to the main www.gamespot.com site. There's a major batch of changes that will hit the beta site on Tuesday as a part of our regular beta release schedule (past release notes are here).

  In addition to many small fixes, two of the significant updates will be:

  - major tweaks to the profile index page layout based on user feedback

  - addition of the new mini-feed panel into the user box in the top-right of every page. This expanding panel will showcase recent blog and tracked games updates and will also bring back the My Games jump-links pulldown.

  Panel preview:
  

  • Posted Aug 8, 2008 1:09 pm GMT
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• 8Aug 08

  About Me

  I've been quiet on the site for a while, so it might be worth a reintroduction...

  I lead the GameSpot "product" group, a small team focused on enhancing and growing GameSpot (plus GameFAQs and SportsGamer) based on the needs of our users, the insights of our editors, and the opportunities presented by partners. We work hand-in-hand with the visual design, technology, editorial, and community teams to drive visible changes to our sites' user experience. We track how our site is used and gather user feedback as key input for future development. We also often stand between editorial and the ad sales team to establish and maintain advertising guidelines.

  I started at GameSpot in April 2000 as PC news editor and wore several hats over several years with the editorial group before shifting over to the technical side of the house to oversee the launches of new sites and features (DLX, our in-house community system, a couple generations of our hardware site, GameCenter, and the Download Manager). I've learned a range of tech skills over the years, but I'm not an engineer or user experience designer. My group is more about defining projects in forward-looking ways (via goals, use cases, etc) and staying engaged while the technical and creative experts implement the best, most practical solutions.

  For the last year, much of my time has been focused in two areas: upgrading our video offering and the GameSpot Wide redesign.

  The video upgrade started with last summer's new Flash video player, which also brought back-end changes enabling the video team to encode and publish videos more efficiently. In the first half of the year we gave the player a facelift that made it more flexible (example: 16:9 vs. 4:3 detection) and easier to embed in various pages on our sites (and it moved to sister sites TV.com and CHOW) and we also rolled out live broadcasting support in Flash for On The Spot and E3.

  GameSpot Wide takes our video a few steps further. Since we couldn't fit even the 640-wide (high resolution, but definitely not HD) player in our standard pages before, going to the wider page format was key for re-integrating video into our main pages (no more popup player) and giving us a great canvas to show off the new 540p HD format. Among the reasons we picked the 540p format is that it's the largest size that can fit nicely in-page and it crisply downscales from the 720p HD size we've published as downloads for years (and will continue to publish for subscribers). The "540p" terminology is intended to make it very transparent that we're not pretending to stream full HD. And for where Web video stands right now, I think 540p is the best format for our content, since you don't have to go full-screen to see the native 960x540 resolution like you do with 1280x720.

  As for the rest of the Wide redesign, there's more about that here.

  • Posted Aug 8, 2008 12:37 pm GMT
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