Now that the Garage feature has been running for a few weeks I wanted to ask for your feedback please. What do you like about the Garage? What do you not like? Did you even know there was this feature on the site? As part of my day job I am part of the team that creates this software. We are looking for feedback and suggestions to help up drive the course of development. Anything you have to add would be helpful. Thanks!!
Love it. The only issue I encountered is that it created multiple garages for the same car somehow and I noticed it is doing it to other people.
In a lot of testing we never found the multiple grage creation. I hate to slough this off but maybe user error, but then again, I don't think we make the best UI we could when it comes to the Manage and Edit functions. I've added a UI overhaul to the version's feature request list. Thanks for the feedback, we are creating the new features list we want to add to the next revisions, please keep the comments and suggestions coming.
We've been looking into to multiple garage creation issue a bit more and trying some usability studies. We keep coming back to a possible poor user interface design when it comes to adding and editing garages. Look for some changes in an updated release. Hopefully in the next few weeks depending on the development schedule. Please keep the comments coming...
How about places to add in track times and dyno runs? It would need a way to list location and configuration of course if this had that feature
We are looking into how to add these items and even more. One area we are having trouble with is the layout when you view a Garage. There is just to much white space. None of us are User Interface (UI) gurus. Any suggestions on making the current layout better are greatly appreciated.
There is not enough room for pictures? Only one allowed for the entertainment ? How do you take a picture of the head unit, amps, speakers all in one shot? Only three for the interior? I like to see picture of cars and not so much the descriptions. I know that it uses a lot of band space(?) but I also notice that half the people that post in the garage only use 3-4 pictures total?
Each Garage space can hold up to 22 images; one main image that will be shown to all Members and 21 within the Garage space itself. GIF, JPEG/JPG, and PNG files are accepted. Uploaded image must be 8MB or less in size. Images in the Garage do not count against image quotas. In addition to the 22 Images per Garage Space, additional images can be added to the text fields. These will need to be hosted in other locations such as an off-site image host, see bbCode Supported in the Garage I'm not worried about the bandwidth or the storage space. BTW, there is detailed help for the Garage
If I only do but one thing well that would be to document. Almost every function has help somehow attached. The drop downs for Clubs, Sponsors, Garage, WheelFinder and ShowCase all have a full set of help documents attached. They are even permission based as well broken down by Admin, Moderator and Member. There is also the How Do I... forums that are indexed and I'm working on a comprehensive set to encompass all the help including every function this site offers. It's a big project but I also plan on marketing the sections to other forums. If you are really curious and bored you can find full versions at vBulletin Help | Drive Thru Online vBulletin Help Documentation And if you really really need to kill time and can only get to this page on the web you'll find video demos as well.
Made a few little changes. There is now a block at the top of the home page that displays random Garages. At the suggestion of one of our Garage Plus clients we did a little editing to the module and you'll note the Garage Name is in bold with the Garage Owners name in italics. We are also working on some code that will prevent the display in the random garage modules of those garages that do not have an image. Don't let this happen to you, add an image today!