DriverGuide Blog

After months of work we’ve completely reworked our download pages and it’s now life!  We listened to your feedback and have cut the clutter!  The new pages are far easier to use, much cleaner, and the proof is in the downloads!  Take a look!

We upgraded quite a bit of code on our backend to make scan and toolkit searches faster!  It’s a lot of work searching so many devices and so many drivers, but we’ve found a few ways to speed things up.  See if you notice the improvements.

We were doing some work on the backend this week, to fix some performance issues and improve results and we had to purge some caches, so search performance will be slower than usual for the next few days.  Sorry, but it’s for a good cause.

We made some improvements to the scan and toolkit search results page. 

• Simplified the page preamble to move the results higher on the page.
• Added a tabbed interface to make the pages shorter, and give you quicker access to the updates you’re likely looking for.
• Cleaned up the page a bit, simplified quite a few areas.

After months of work we’ve just released our first “Version 3″ update. Much more to come, but this is the foundation on top of which the other stuff will come.

Our mission in this major update was to reduce the clutter and complexity of the site, try to improve the usability of the existing features, and then add new and exciting features.

On Monday we went live with the new first release, primary changes at this point include:

• Update the header/footer to be cleaner, more useful.
• Eliminate the cluttered left and right navigation columns from all pages. Rely instead on context relevant features and a “sub tab” where those features can be accessed.
• Redesign our old “search wizard” to deliver an easier experience more akin to a guided browse, including breadcrumb navigation links to go back.
• Redesign our driver lists to make them easier to use, including a breadcrumb navigation links to go back.
• Recreate the new home page to focus on the primary things users want to do when they come to our site: 1) keyword search for their driver! 2) scan their system for driver updates! 3) browse for updates based on manufacturer/device type.
• Replace our old search engine with a new one! We now use a new backend search engine which is much better. An exciting new search UI will come in the next few weeks!
• and more…

So, welcome to v3, hope you like it, and if you don’t, tell us (but don’t be a jerk about it, give us specific feedback, good or bad)!

Quinxy

We’ve collected tens of thousands of download comments and ratings from our members and while the vast majority are helpful and serious, some folks out get confused or are just joking around and put in bogus entries, so we did some housekeeping and cleaned out the invalid ones.

We have one of the most complete databases of device manufacturers out there.  We’ve got about 5,000 companies in our database, and for most of them we’ve got websites, phone numbers, addresses, product listings, and more.  We used to make this information available only to our members and tech professionals, but now we’re making it available to everyone.  Perhaps we’ll leave it open to the public, perhaps we’ll restrict access again to only our members.  Let us know what you think.

DriverGuide is proud to announce our new design! It’s the same site you’ve always known, now with a better interface. Beyond merely improving the look we’re also working to improve the interfaces to many of our features, making things more friendly to novice users while not losing any of the features important to veteran users. And many exciting new features and services are on the horizon and will be launched in the coming weeks and months.

And if you find bugs and want to switch back to the old look/interface until we resolve them you can do that by choosing the appropriate option in the left hand nav.