New Habbo website :)

[Cerys]

It's not great, imo.
They're trying to make it modern, which is good in some aspects but bad in others.

[Jordan]

A great improvement. Some things need to be tweeked/added but on a whole a nice design Does this mean articles are being ditched and stuff being sent in minimail or what?

[xxMATTGxx]

Hi there!

We've seen a great deal of questions emerge today, with the launch of the new website design, about groups and forums as well as the role of the website in general. I wanted to address some of those questions and also try to explain a little bit about the process we use when we make decisions on different features.

The reason why we are focusing on the Hotel right now, is because we have been studying our traffic data for a while, and seen that the majority of the time you spend in Habbo, you spend inside the Hotel. The time you spend looking around on the website has been steadily decreasing, and is in fact quite marginal at the moment. For Habbos that have been around for a while, it might seem easy to navigate between the Hotel and the website, but we do see a lot of confusion and pleas for us to make all things important available inside the Hotel. So it's really all about easy access.

The website (and the way we've been using it) is relatively old fashioned, also from a technical point of view, so to keep the product development efficient and bug-free, we need to simplify the structure of the two pieces (the Hotel and the Website). We call this the simplicity principle. For now, that means removing some of the things that are not being used at the moment and making sure we don't have too many duplicate features (features that appear both in the Hotel and on the website). At the same time, we want build a more robust application with new and user friendly interfaces that will work for future features and releases, both for web and for mobile Habbo, maybe also for others to use to create Habbo apps and tools?

We are also want to further develop Group functionalities in the Hotel, meaning more tools for group owners and admins (including better communication channels, e.g. a group wall for quick postings and discussions, as well as an IM-like group chat). Anything that comes to your mind that would help hosting groups and group event, keep your tweets coming! You can obviously also post your comments and ideas on the LabChat discussion forum on Habbo.com. Speaking of forums, they will stay as they are, since they are better for longer offline discussions. However, we are evaluating better forum engines as our own is quite old, and developing a new one is not our core competence.

Then finally, about our feature decisions and how we arrive at them. Basically, we look at three different things when making the design decisions. As you can guess, a lot of data and statistics are evaluated, e.g. how many Habbos use a certain feature currently, how often and how much time is spent? Most of the time the data will give us very straightforward answers, which means decisions are easy to make. Other times we might find that only a very few are using a feature, but they in turn use it a lot. In this situation, we have to ask for more information (e.g. through Yurre's LabChats or polls) in order to find out how and why the feature is being used and whether it can be improved or rather replaced by a better and more used feature (remember the simplicity principle?) And yes, sometimes we have to just try and see what happens, to find out whether or not our assumptions were correct. This is the scariest method!

Whenever something new has launched, no matter what the method is, we always look at the numbers, listen to your feedback, and make sure nothing breaks after the product launches. If we have broken something, we will fix it. If you are terribly unhappy, we will look at ways to improve it. Because at the end of the day, we love Habbo as much as you do So thank you for your comments and feedback, keep them coming. Together we can make Habbo the best place to be!

Tweeted By: https://twitter.com/#!/heini_kaihu

[jasey]

I think it is simply brilliant. Cheers to Paul, Habbo and everyone who worked on this!

[MKR&*42]

@Charlotte has a very nice opinion on the new homepage and the hotel view (there's black spray paint cause i said something rudeee) :



Oh, before that screenshot she rants about how childish it looks (yes she doesn't mind the pic. being here).

OT: I'm still so-so about it, It's kinda good but I still desire long news articles

[JerseySafety]

WAY to modern. Imo its hideous.

So hard to navigate to.

[-:Undertaker:-]

Lol that group is hilarious with it being on Habbo Hotel, way to poke a wasps nest.

[karter]

a big argument here, share the problems you are facing due to the new layout

http://www.habbo.com/groups/296747/i...ons/1205077/id

P.S This forum is owned by Yurre(Habbo Research Staff)

[wiktoria]

i really don't like it. they should've kept the friends online thing ugh.

[kitten]

i don't like it at all