Elara PC Builder (Beta), comments please ....

Catalyst

Finally launched the a Beta version of the new PC builder

Builder Page: http://www.elara.ie/customize/start.asp
Forum Page: http://www.elara.ie/forum/index.php

Hoping to get some feedback, st the moment, all PC builds are closely monitored to check for compatibility, but it should be all web driven at the end....

Any comments would be appreciated, is it too complicated?

Compatibility should be taken care of by the system although there is more to come i.e 1 less pci slot available when choosing sli, coolong options for CPU, North/South Bridge, fans, option to just buy components ......

Thanks for your help!!

white_falcon

well in my opinion it does seem a bit complicated. I like to start off screen with the general PC's you can configure and the pics, but then when you select one and configure it, theres too much going on all around the screen. I'd prefer to just have a very plain screen with a list of the components you can have, and the prices of them (and a link to their full desription). I was quite confused with the whole system to be quite honest but it does seem well made.

Maybe have a look at www.hardwareversand.de system builder for a general idea. Just my opinion that you have too much going on

L31mr0d

yeah its nice but it is rather complicated. I'd rather have it all happen on one screen. You could make it flash based and just have the lists automatically load once a component is chosen. It seems like a very fragmented version of the DELL PC builder system. The one on Komplett has drop down menus and seems a lot more intuitive. Plus you can have a look back at the items you have previously chosen if you need to make some changes without having to change to another page.

Anti

I dont like it at all to be honest. Its way to much work to build a whole pc using your site. If you could keep it all on one page, and just use drop down menus for all the components it would be much easier.

Catalyst

Looks like it is too complicated then, will have to build a lite version, the reason for the structure at the moment is because you can choose from alot of components on the site.

As an example, there are

49 Cases
167 Motherboards
47 Processors
91 Hard Disk
153 Graphics Cards .....

Does a one page configurator with 4-5 options for each component with an option to choose from the full range sound more user friendly ?

Thanks for the comments, keep them coming

Anti

I think thats best, would be just one page. With each component title, then using a drop down list you can pick anyone you want. No need to only list a few. As spice is the variety of life

Dont forget to add on options like uprated coolers, add on cards like tv-tuners, controllers etc etc. Even some modding options would be nice.

L31mr0d

personally, I think flash based would be the way to go, with maybe a backup html lite version. It would be good to have a system where I could go to a site and be given the following fields to fill in: budget, purpose, prefered manufacturers (i.e. intel, nvidia...etc), OS, then click "generate" and have it build a machine within those parameters to fit closely to my budget. You could also have a system where a user can assign importance values to different components (i.e. 1. GPU, 2. CPU, 3. Mobo, 4. PSU... etc) and the machine can be budgeted accordingly.

For the flash version you could have a cascading tree structure. In that it starts from either the top or the left with the first component (I think the most important one will be the mobo) which will then open up the next branchs in the tree (i.e CPU) which will then open up the next branch. Each time a selection is made it is added to a list of the total selections on the left.

Anti

Thats just way to complicated

L31mr0d

Anti wrote:

Thats just way to complicated

aye, which is why I said it should have various layers of complexity. I personally like it to be complicated with details (not with navigation).

Your basic user could just run the generator and select that PC. Where as a more experienced user could modify it afterwards.

Raskolnikov

Great idea, but that implementation looks complicated alright.

Anti

Yeah, but unless someone in their company can do what you have explained it will cost them a fair bit of money to get someone else to do it for them. Its a good 24 hours work to do that. Posibly more.

L31mr0d

Anti wrote:

Yeah, but unless someone in their company can do what you have explained it will cost them a fair bit of money to get someone else to do it for them. Its a good 24 hours work to do that. Posibly more.

well yeah, someone in their web development team would need to know flash. I'm a mere Sys Admin at the company I work for, but one of the developers here completely redesigned and built a brand new, fully bashed, booking engine in Ajax in less than a week.

I'd gathered from Catalyst that maybe they are the ones developing this new builder.

Catalyst

thats right, builder is developed inhouse, should have a lite version up by tommorrow so it should be less complicated.

Like L31mr0d said, some kind of wizard sounds good, where you can be asked a few questions and up comes a configured PC. Will probably leave something like that for later as it would take some time to build....