If you've visited BlueCyborg at one of my pop-up shops or conventions, you might have noticed that I spend a slightly ridiculous amount of time setting everything up.
There is a reason for that.
I want someone looking for a particular thing to be able to spot it quickly. Dice should look like dice. Miniatures should be easy to explore. Games should invite you to pick them up. And if you've come looking specifically for gemstone dice, you shouldn't need a treasure map to find them.
But there's another side to it too.
Some of the best finds happen when you don't know exactly what you're looking for.
You wander along the stand, something catches your eye, you pick it up and suddenly you've found the thing you didn't know you wanted.
After all, sometimes the journey is more fun than the destination.
Somewhere along the way, the website lost a bit of that
As BlueCyborg's online range has grown, I've kept adding ways to get directly to particular things.
That makes perfect sense if you already know what you want. Looking for gemstone dice? There's a route to gemstone dice. Looking for a particular product range? I want to get you there as quickly as possible.
But over time, all those routes started turning into rather a lot of menu items.
The shop had become increasingly good at answering “Where are the gemstone dice?”, but not necessarily as good at answering “What dice have you got?”
And that's quite different from the way I approach my physical shops.
So this week, I've been changing it.
A new menu built for finding and browsing
I've completely reorganised the main BlueCyborg menu.
I've simplified the routes into the main parts of the shop, making it quicker to get to the right section without confronting you with every possible destination before you've even started looking.
Once you're there, you can explore.
If you know exactly what you want, I still want you to be able to get there quickly. But if you just fancy looking through dice, games, miniatures or accessories to see what takes your fancy, that should be easy too.
In other words, I've tried to bring a little more of the way I set up my pop-up shops to the online store.
Finding a game for the people around your table
Games are a good example of the new approach.
You don't always start by knowing the name of the game you want.
Sometimes the question is simply: What can the four of us play?
Or perhaps you want something fairly straightforward rather than an enormous box accompanied by a rulebook that could double as a doorstop.
At an event, you can tell me who's playing and what sort of thing you're after, and we'll start looking. I've tried to make the website a little better at doing the same thing.
I've added new ways to narrow down the games based on number of players, complexity and age suitability.
You can start with the people who are actually going to play and gradually narrow the shelves down to games that suit them.
And then there were the miniatures...
The miniature section has probably had the biggest overhaul of all.
The collection has grown enormously, and simply having hundreds of miniatures on a page isn't much use when you're trying to find your character.
So I've been going through the catalogue and adding much more useful information to individual models.
You can now narrow down the collection using things such as character race, class, scale and miniature type.
Need a dwarf?
A wizard?
An NPC for the party to meet?
A monster for the party to wish they hadn't met?
You can start with a broad collection and gradually narrow it down rather than having to know the exact name I've given the miniature you're looking for.
I've also deliberately grouped and simplified some of those choices. The goal isn't to give you the maximum possible number of filters. It's to give you the useful ones.
Otherwise I'd just be replacing an unruly menu with an unruly filter list.
A bit more like rummaging around the BlueCyborg stand
When I set up a pop-up shop, I spend hours thinking about where things go. I want you to be able to walk straight to the gemstone dice if that's what you've come for, but I also want you to be able to wander around until something unexpected catches your eye.
The online shop had become a little too good at the first part and not nearly good enough at the second.
So have a rummage around the new site. Browse the dice without knowing which dice you want. Tell the games section who's playing and see what it comes up with. Go looking for a sensible miniature and somehow end up looking at an owlbear.
You might find exactly what you came for.
Or, perhaps more dangerously, something you didn't know you wanted.