Equipboard Page Ideas

Alright everyone, your Equipboard profile pages are well overdue for a refresh. gchiaren and I have some ideas, but we want to hear from you all before developing anything.

So, what is the biggest thing we can do to improve this page?

PS- Just for clarity, this is the page I'm talking about, where you save your own collection of gear.

I'll throw in some things I'd like to see, in no particular order:

• In the forum, the 3 pieces of gear that are featured from your Equipboard make no sense. It would be cool to be able to select your 3 favorite or most important pieces of equipment.
• If someone added gear photos, it would be great to see those first thing on someone's profile. I think setup pics are very interesting and they can then give way to the list of gear.
• The WANT list should behave like a more traditional wishlist. I think one of Equipboard's advantages is, as an independent website, it's not beholden to any one store or marketplace, so it would be cool to pull interesting info from your wishlist items like who has the lowest new price, the fastest shipping, the best used price, etc. And I could periodically get emails if something goes on sale.

I'll throw in some things I'd like to see, in no particular order:

• In the forum, the 3 pieces of gear that are featured from your Equipboard make no sense. It would be cool to be able to select your 3 favorite or most important pieces of equipment.
• If someone added gear photos, it would be great to see those first thing on someone's profile. I think setup pics are very interesting and they can then give way to the list of gear.
• The WANT list should behave like a more traditional wishlist. I think one of Equipboard's advantages is, as an independent website, it's not beholden to any one store or marketplace, so it would be cool to pull interesting info from your wishlist items like who has the lowest new price, the fastest shipping, the best used price, etc. And I could periodically get emails if something goes on sale.

I concur with every one of those points... the forum images make me crazy, I have 3 lame, every day pieces of gear under my user pic out of a collection of stuff that's way cooler. I would like a few more gear porn slots and then yeah, it would be cool if they were at the top of my user page. As I am redoing my homestudio in my bedroom to give my son more space to play downstairs its actually looking pretty cool and I would love to upload the pics. The wish list definitely needs easier integration with yor shopping partners.... I find it difficult using equipboard for sweetwater because I do a lot of my sweetwater stuff by phone. I'm doing large orders and don't always know what I need and I lean on my 'sales engineer' to help me integrate everything. I deal with sweetwater and vintage king because of the personalized service putting rigs together on budget. You should work something out with them for orders that are done that way where like I could give Elliott a code so you get a kickbackon stuff I didn't put in the cart via equipboard. Often I buy demo units and I can't add them to my cart via your page so there's something else sticking you in the shopping department.

All of the above sounds epic.

The only other thing I can think of is maybe a "Rig layout," where you can show off how you run your signal chain. For instance, mine right now'd look like: Firefly FFTH>Joyo Tauren>Collision Devices Black Hole Symmetry>Joyo Aquarius>Vox Pathfinder 15R.

What would be even cooler is if you could figure out a way for you to list what settings you had the amps/pedals set to--but that's like, pie in the sky ultimate dream dear-gods-the-absurd-amount-of-coding-that-would-probably-take-nevermind-don't-listen-to-me stuff.

Anyroad, yeah, more pictures of gearporn, and the ability to select what three pieces of gear show up on forums, because seriously--you think YOU have it bad, Jim? Look under mine!

LOL it just occurred to me there's no upvote/downvote buttons. Guess you'll just have to live with an upvote post for now.

+1 for everyone

(it'd be nice if we could edit our comments on each other's gear too, now that I think about it)

Thanks for the feedback so far. The work to overhaul your profile pages is underway, so if you have suggestions, now's the time to keep them coming!

So, the gear saved to your profiles, let's call each piece of gear a "card" (it's kind of tech speak but bear with me).

I'm curious, do you all like the way it is now, where each card has a little preview of the review you've written for the gear? Like this:

https://i.imgur.com/TzmplEe.png

OR would you prefer a cleaner card, with only the gear's picture and name, and to go and read and manage the reviews you've written (or want to write), that would live on its own dedicated page? Minimalist cards would look like this:

https://i.imgur.com/f5gWJ5B.png

We want you to be proud of building your profile pages, with photos, reviews, etc. And to that end we want you to want to share them with your musician buddies and other gear communities. By including the start of your review on each card, is that too "busy" looking? Do you prefer a cleaner look? Or do you like seeing the start of the review so you can click on "more" to read the full thing?

I don’t think the way the cards look now is too busy. That’s just me; I’ll let others who disagree chime in.

I like it the way it is right now but I'm a creature of habit. I also find looking at someone else's page reading the first sentence of the review will draw me in or I'll think "wow, what a moron!" and click away,

Hey! The first image is from my page! I'm famous now! :D (also, the 12 string and the AK95 are 4 and 5 star reviews, respectively, not sure why that doesn't show up on my page, but there ya are)

I like the way the cards are now. It feels... More complete? More complete. I guess that's right. That's what I'm going with. Plus it lets me see at a glance what other people may think of the same gear I have so I can compare notes.

Logged in to suggest option for user to make gear/studio photos more prominent*. Happy to see @Gchiaren already suggested. Big +1 to that. Maybe I'd actually add some if you could get more mileage out of 'em ;)

*However, if the photos were prominently titled with the word "Porn", IDK... I probably wouldn't want that to be first thing ppl see. Maybe this is just me.

*However, if the photos were prominently titled with the word "Porn", IDK... I probably wouldn't want that to be first thing ppl see. Maybe this is just me.

No, not just you. We're getting rid of that terminology. In general, the gear photos have always been one of those "half baked" sort of features. We want to redo it, and make them much more prominent. It makes sense that photos lead the way into someone's Equipboard profile. For example, if I had a custom car or motorcycle build, you would want to see the finished product first, and then the parts list. Same thing with a music studio, pedalboard, etc.

To give you an update, we're probably 3-4 days away at this point from rolling out your new Equipboard profiles. One of the biggest changes will be that you are free to make whatever sections or lists you want (don't worry we'll carry over what everyone has currently so you have a base to start from).

Solusash mentioned this:

The only other thing I can think of is maybe a "Rig layout," where you can show off how you run your signal chain.

We won't quite have that exact functionality, BUT with the ability to make multiple lists, nothing will stop you from having, say, a "My Amps" list where you list your Vox Pathfinder 15R and any other amps you own, and another "Signal Flow" list where you lay out the order in which your guitar > pedals > amp is hooked up.

We'll call this upcoming revamp version 1, but be aware that this will not yet include an overhaul of the gear photos. Redoing gear photos requires some special attention, so we'll call that version 2 and it'll be released a little bit after.

Looking forward to hearing what you all think once it's out!

To give you an update, we're probably 3-4 days away at this point from rolling out your new Equipboard profiles. One of the biggest changes will be that you are free to make whatever sections or lists you want (don't worry we'll carry over what everyone has currently so you have a base to start from).

We'll call this upcoming revamp version 1, but be aware that this will not yet include an overhaul of the gear photos. Redoing gear photos requires some special attention, so we'll call that version 2 and it'll be released a little bit after.

Looking forward to hearing what you all think once it's out!

The update is much appreciated, thank you! We're all looking forward to seeing the next round of changes. Godspeed to all Engineers and Designers involved.

By including the start of your review on each card, is that too "busy" looking? Do you prefer a cleaner look?

While I generally prefer more minimal designs, the reviews are one of the main reasons I hang around here. It's fairly rare for someone to have reviewed equipment anyway. If I see a review preview, I'll often click through to read it - and on my own gear page, it reminds me that "yeah I really should write a review of that soon". It would be annoying if I had to click through each item just to see if someone had reviewed it or not.

One of my favorite things is the ability to re-order items on my page, so I hope that stays, at least on desktop. I've agonized over my gear order, so while I haven't got around writing reviews of everything I have drag&drop-ordered all my plugins from Favorite to Least Favorite.

Will the new pages show our own personal ratings of our gear? At the moment the ratings it shows are the Equipboard averages, not the star rating I've personally given something. I can understand showing the Equipboard rating if someone hasn't reviewed an item though (maybe as a less bright / saturated version of the star graphics, to give the hint it's the default and not the personal rating?) I actually logged on to the forums today to ask about how to get my personal gear ratings to show!

We won't quite have that exact functionality, BUT with the ability to make multiple lists, nothing will stop you from having, say, a "My Amps" list where you list your Vox Pathfinder 15R and any other amps you own, and another "Signal Flow" list where you lay out the order in which your guitar > pedals > amp is hooked up.

We'll call this upcoming revamp version 1, but be aware that this will not yet include an overhaul of the gear photos. Redoing gear photos requires some special attention, so we'll call that version 2 and it'll be released a little bit after.

Looking forward to hearing what you all think once it's out!

Looking forward to this update! Multiple lists sounds close-a-dang-nuff for me, especially since I've uh... essentially doubled my instrument collection since January of this year. That'll help me organize things a little better, and anyone who bothers to keep up with my stuff it'll help them see what it is I used to get the sound I got.

So this is going to be super cool. Very much excite!

THE GOOD NEWS: The new profile page is rolling out as we speak!!

THE BAD NEWS: A tremendous amount of code changed during this release, and there's a brand spankin' new underlying structure. It'll take a few hours to convert every member in the Equipboard database to the new structure. So if you go to your profile and it's empty... don't panic!! It just means your user id hasn't yet been processed for the conversion to take place. The starting point for your own Equipboard profile page will be just as it was when you last made any changes to it.

To keep the integrity of the database while we convert everyone, we temporarily disabled saving any gear. That functionality will of course be back ASAP.

I'll keep this thread updated when the rollout of the new code finishes doing it's thang. Happy Friday everyone. 🍻

Congrats on the rollout! I'm looking forward to my new card UI reality.

Done! Saving items has been re-enabled as well.

Play with it at your leisure. Excited to hear your feedback!

This is clean! Nice!

Feels inconsistent in relation to the home page & forums though. Guessing you guys are gonna refresh those next.

Awesome stuff! =D

So if you go to your profile and it's empty... don't panic!!

Aren't the letters on the guide supposed to be all caps and cheeriiy colored? its been awhile but i feel sure I'm right about that.

I'll keep this thread updated when the rollout of the new code finishes doing it's thang. Happy Friday everyone. 🍻

glad I saved my polysix already

can i still post reviews to gear?

I had a thought for a new feature too... you know how you have the gear recommender? what if you did an artist recommender. Like if I type in that I really was interested in pink floyd's gear it would give me a bunch of lesser known prog rock bands that used synthesizers and hiwatts and stuff... that's a bad example maybe. More like if I look up NIN and I get filter but also pop will eat itself, ministry, puppy etc? But also you would get like Gary Neuman, new order, but also throbbing gristle and neubauten, like related bands and also the roots and you could see what gear built up to Trent Reznor. Maybe that's also a bad example but I feel like buuilding some sort of musicology helper into EB is a sound idea because all this music comes from somewhere and a lot of times it starts out with one guy getting a brand new marshall in the 60s or an arp odyssey in the 70s...