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Playstation Store redesign – the biggest UX Failure of 2020

Vitaly Rtishchev on October 24, 2020

This week Sony updated design of PS Store, the majority of countries received update so you will be able to see this new version. And it is a compl...
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AlbertoM

The ps store is god awful, sometimes it takes several seconds before my profile icon shows up and don't try opening it on safari, it's not even supported. I guess that considering how slow it's the UI on the ps4 it's fitting that the web store is also crappy

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Gord Lacey

I went to the store today and looked at some of the sales. No way to sort in any manner, so the Sims 4 DLC is all over the place (not what I was looking for, just something I noticed). As you mentioned it's impossible to know what something is without clicking on it. I thought they had "Life is Strange Season 2" for $5.99 CAN, which I'd definitely pick up, but then I saw more and more icons that were slightly different. Turns out it was Episode 4 I was looking at. I'm sure there was a "complete season" there somewhere, but I wasn't able to find it. A horrible, horrible mess. I guess the good news is that when they're trying to figure out why sales dropped on the store, it'll be pretty easy to figure out why.

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Julia Flash

That has happened to me too in Steam - I sift through different Life is Strange episodes trying to find the first one and keep getting recommended to anything but the first episode, then have to Google what the first episode looks like to find it. Once I did though, wow what a great and heartfelt game, some of the decisions within the game can be so cringey though too! I still think about my decisions sometimes 😂

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Anders

Some developers should feel real ashamed for shipping something that inefficient : (

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GlyphCat

Developers are just doing their jobs and rushing deadlines. The sinful people are likely to be those above them, usually.

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Vitaly Rtishchev

My top suggestion is that Sony outsourced this project and like 90% of money landed in wrong hands at a wrong time

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Thibaut Allender

Rushing deadlines by writing a shitload of JS? Sure, sounds like a sensible approach. If you're not up to the task and start killing flies with bazookas, you are as responsible as the idiot who hired you and set the crazy deadlines.

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Anders

Certainly it can be a factor, but that seems like an unfortunate excuse to make. There are probably "reasons", but the result is the same.

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Johnny P

Their store is STILL a complete disaster. They have a Spring Sale right now and I'm interested in looking for VR games on sale. There is no way to sort by ANYTHING, let alone VR games on sale. Their sale pages (which, there's 38 pages of!), also has everything in the list including DLC. They are out of their minds if they think this website is designed for the end user. I've only bought one game since the redesign last year and it was a game I knew I wanted, so didn't have to search it out. I've complained to them through Twitter, no response. They really don't care what their users think. Sad.

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Azural Strike

I'm not here to defend ps stores new layout but you've noted in your games grid section about the resident evil 2 titles... one is clearly resident evil 2 remake the other is clearly the remake raccoon city edition which is resident evil 2 and 3 remakes. Now I get your arguement if a game isn't clear but you need to make the arguement better here.

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Vitaly Rtishchev

Yep, sure, here are some better ones:

  • Nioh with DLCs that are sold separately – they do not look the same, but it's not clear what are they
  • Plants vs Zombies – two completely the same items with different price – you need to click both to know that the first one is the game and the second one is the upgrade
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Galih Pradipto Wisnujati • Edited

I don't think so, some company prefer to load high resolution image, because it's based on their customer preference. Yes, customer is not always a developer who is aware about fast loading. Sometimes it's quite slow but still acceptable by customer. Some brands, such as laptop brand and phone brand, in fact, load videos on the first interface of their website. It's based on their customer preference

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Vitaly Rtishchev

The problem is not about images or videos, they are fine – the site loads 2mb of images and 10mb of javascript, that is not acceptable

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Manoel Soares • Edited

I'm so glad someone addressed this! This has been bothering me for a long time!
Not only is the store now an eyesore (this white background is awful, the old dark blue background is so much prettier and easier on the eyes), now you can no longer add any filters to your search!
As if all the problems you mentioned weren't enough, now you can't sort out what you're looking for because you have no filters! Now you can at least see the games' titles, though, but that's not nearly enough!
And to make matters worse, the PS4 Store that used to run smoothly and without any problems now is nothing like it used to be. Yeah, there are still trailers and screenshots, but the store practically freezes when you open them! They take ages to load and sometimes won't load at all! And this is not an internet speed problem, my connection is really fast! It seems like they pulled all this crap just to make you give the PS4 up and force you into buying the PS5 (which I suppose has a better performance on the store).
As for the wishlist, there is a better alternative, the site PSPrices (now that I think about it, PSPrices is actually an alternative to the whole PS Store, since you can still see screenshots and watch trailers there!) Not only can you keep track of your favorite games, you can also keep track of their prices, you can see what was the lowest price a game had wait for a sale to get a better deal and choose to receive notification by email! Sometimes the prices are a little different than on the PS Store, so it's good to double-check it (that only happened once, though), but that's about it.

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Kior

They should fire the entire staff that was developing the new site and its design. :|

Can't do anything on website because of - Looks like you were looking for something completely different...

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Darlan Tódero ten Caten

it's 2021 and the website continues to be that shit. I can't understand how a company of its size doesn't see how bad it is!

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Gavin

So glad someone called this out...I just cant get over how bad it is...I mean no filters...what the hell.

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shadowtime2000

Wow didn't know a big company could make a mistake like that. Looks like more people will be buying Xbox Series X then.

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AlikiP

Really liked your comments!It is amazing how the simplest concepts cannot be understood by the execs before releasing such a huge project!

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Matyi Csorba

Good article!
I'm hoping that this is just a half done job, and they will release a new ps store site when the ps5 comes out

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slimco

I hope that once I wake up, the good old design will be restored. My wishlist is gone :( I will never see discounts on my games in one place.

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Manoel Soares

Well, you can do that in PSPrices! In fact, they even still got the games screenshots and trailers there! =D You can keep track of the prices too, making sure you save the most ;)

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Matthew Francis

At least this version works in desktop Safari.

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Vitaly Rtishchev

I guess that was an accidental outcome that comes with redesign

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Alan Tyloo

The website is bad, but to say Sony does not care, I would not say so. There's probably some incompetent people managing that.