The new Analog Devices website

[blackdog]

Hi

I received an answer of ADI:

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Hello Bram,

Thank you for taking the time and providing feedback on our new site.
Your feedback will help us continuously improve the site and provide a better experience to our customers.

Regards,
...........
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Looks like a computer generated reply 

Kind regarts,
Blackdog

[German_EE]

To repeat, the link for website feedback is: https://form.analog.com/Form_Pages/feedback/websiteInfo.aspx

The message I sent was:

0/10 for the new website design guys. It takes four times as long to load then fills the screen with useless information and pictures. I'm guessing that an engineer is not responsible for this mess.

The reply I received is as follows:

Hello German_EE,

 

Thank you for taking the time and providing feedback on our new site. Your feedback will help us continuously improve the site and provide a better experience to our customers.

 

Regards,

Lucy

Yet another copy and paste reply 

[atferrari]

Hola codeboy2K

I know that my request is more about Adblock but could not get it to work

Tried to paste your code in two different ways into the "options" from ABP but they seem not to "take" there.

If I individually ask ABP to block this or that by clicking on this or that (after closing the popup) some info is included in the "to filter" list but the whole thing is still loaded.

I know is not about the site but about ABP. All this far from my knowledge. Sorry and thanks.

[janaf]

Did you click the Edit button before pasting?

Tried to paste your code in two different ways into the "options" from ABP but they seem not to "take" there.

[atferrari]

Did you click the Edit button before pasting?

Tried to paste your code in two different ways into the "options" from ABP but they seem not to "take" there.

Yes.

The code works now after cleaing completely the list inside ABP. Have to rework the list for those sites I visit frequently.

Gracias for the help.

[tom66]

Same response:

Hello Thomas,
 
Thank you for taking the time and providing feedback on our new site. Your feedback will help us continuously improve the site and provide a better experience to our customers.
 
Regards,
Lucy

----

The new website is really terrible. It is hard to find anything I need, slow to load, difficult to read, and doesn't utilise widescreen monitors well. I hope you change it back or improve ASAP as currently it is nearly unusable for me. A real shame because your previous website was absolutely fine, why change something that was doing the job well. I'm guessing no-one has asked an actual engineer to use this site!

[codeboy2k]

Adblock code made the drop-down menus disappear? No, they are back now?!?  Maybe. Yes!

Thanks for the code codeboy2K!

The drop downs didn't disappear for me   Hope you're ok now.  You're welcome!

The dropdowns are wayyyy toooooo slowwwwwww, however. Maybe there's a userscript we can figure out to make it change the animate speed in the Javascript.

Don't know about you but basically I use two things on manufacturer pages:

- Parametric search
- Datasheet

Occasionally, circuit design / calculators.

The rest naaaah.

I'm the same.. that's all I use it for, so I want that activity to be optimized, and get rid of all the cruft.

[amyk]

Suggestions that you will use a competitor's parts instead might get a bit more attention from them...

[Bud]

I think with this change ADI will only achieve the opposite - people will stop visiting their garbage web site, and go straight to datasheets from search engines. So ADI better to think how to redesign all the datasheets and put the ad garbage right there. My be I should patent this idea.

EDIT: may be Dave could consider busting it on the next eevBlab, with enough views may make ADI to listen.

[funkyant]

It's funny, because I was just complaining about the new http://labgruppen.com/ website. Looks like exactly the same template 

[janaf]

They have to realize that techs don't visit web sites for entertainment, but for technical facts 

[janaf]

As I like the Digikey site, I look at it daily, I sometimes suggest improvements, and pointed at Analog as a bad example (yes, I know Digikey its not perfect, yes I know they are not a manufacturer).

Part of a reply from a User Experience Analyst made me worried:

We’ve taken a look at Analog, what specifically are you finding you hate about the site? We’re noticing a number of features specifically on their filtering pages that we get requests for quite often. Any input is appreciated.

[ivan747]

I was literally running around the office yesterday and complaining about it with my hand in the air like an Italian. I dont know what kind of morons are responsible for the website layouts. It was one of the best usable before, now it is like a Infineon and Maxim copycat, with huge scrolling pictures on the front, while you need to click several times to get to the product list. I guess investors are more important than engineers, and investors love pictures of cars and running womans. Fairchild did the same last year. How does this meeting go? "Sales are not good" "I guess we need more pictures on our website and harder access to information, and also make it compatible with mobile phones, because engineers usually design stuff with tablets and mobile phones and not PCs with 2-3-4-5 screeens"

You know what the worst part is? They had an excellent technical library, with static links. I've used it in documentation, I think there are even some in my thesis (because they had exactly the same links years and years ago). Guess what. They broke it all.
I wanted to write an email complaining, but couldn't figure out their contact email.

Links to published literature should be static by law.

[codeboy2k]

As I like the Digikey site, I look at it daily, I sometimes suggest improvements, and pointed at Analog as a bad example (yes, I know Digikey its not perfect, yes I know they are not a manufacturer).

Part of a reply from a User Experience Analyst made me worried:

We’ve taken a look at Analog, what specifically are you finding you hate about the site? We’re noticing a number of features specifically on their filtering pages that we get requests for quite often. Any input is appreciated.

Digikey is vastly improved with this userscript.  The author is here on Dave's blog too, but I forget his username.

https://www.eewiki.net/display/Motley/advancedsearch+Greasemonkey+Userscript+for+Digikey.com

If they revamp their site in the future, all this will instantly break.

[mrflibble]

Woah! An unfortunate example of "Design by social media infected twat. For your inconvenience. ". One compliment I can give them is that it looks like they did succesfully map urls from old to new. But comparing old vs new ... old was not perfect, but new has more drawbacks IMO. Oh well...

Randomly selected page old vs new:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140712181718/http://www.analog.com/en/power-management/mosfet-drivers/products/index.html
http://www.analog.com/en/power-management/mosfet-drivers/products/index.html

Way too much screen estate wasted on irrelevant fluff on the new version. It will be interesting to see if feedback actually gets incorporated after they just spent a chunk of cash to downgrade their website...

[c4757p]

Ugh.  Awful.  Sites like that make me wonder what kind of idiots design things like that and actually think it is a good idea.  Well I guess it was a good idea for the web design company that made a year's salary selling the "modern" design to ADI, but it certainly isn't a good idea for anyone that wants to USE the site to be PRODUCTIVE.
Honestly I think just about the best electronics industry site out there is and has long been DIGIKEY's.  NOT that DIGIKEY's site is what I'd call GOOD, but if you turn off all the flashy Web 2.0 stuff and avoid the "interactive catalog" stuff at least you're left with a simple no-frills information dense search engine that has a minimally useful number of parameters and only wastes your time looking in 5-6 different places for what you want as opposed to it being totally hopelessly useless.

You know if they just booted all the "web designers/developers" off the planet and got the sites designed by the RIGHT REAL PROFESSIONALS it'd be MUCH better.  Who, then, should be DESIGNING these sites?
LIBRARY SCIENCE professionals.  Old folks like me actually remember being able to walk into an ENGINEERING LIBRARY and using the PAPER CATALOGS and still be able to find about any obscure thing one was looking for within a minute or maybe a few minutes if you didn't have the specifics and had to browse categorically.  At least things were SEMANTICALLY ORGANIZED.  That only gets better when you can use computers and organize the metadata 100 ways and interface to databases, perform SQL queries and sorting and cross correlation searches and all that. 

Please, semiconductor companies, we don't WANT pretty pictures, videos, or "lovely" "desktop publishing" "press ready" formatted & kerned not-really-searchable, not-really-indexed PDFs of DATASHEETS, we want the darn METADATA and PARAMETRIC DATA in a MACHINE READABLE DATA FORMAT.  B2B.
Web sites should be FOR COMPUTERS, not FOR PEOPLE.  Let my own search tools figure out what *I'm* looking for and then PRESENT and FORMAT that distilled information how I want.  I don't want your "slideshow" or "movie" about your whiz bang products.  I want to be able to efficiently ENGINEER with the prodcts' data.

Why the heck are we doing MANUAL DATA ENTRY for package MCAD or 384 pin BGA pinouts or manually interpolating some datasheet performance curve whatever ON THE SCREEN WITH A RULER from *PDF FILES* in 2015?  Just put the RAW DATA into a DATABASE we can use -- web sites, PDF files, online searches only GET IN THE WAY!
Electronic semantic parameterized datasheets & models & databases in 2015, please!

This. So much this. All of it.

[hans]

Just thrown together in the last hour or so:
https://userstyles.org/styles/110933/analog-devices-unmodernized

Let me know if any pages are broken so I can see if it's fixable - or feel free to modify & redistribute

Still feel bad I couldn't figure out how to efficiently replace the "Features & Benefits" header on product pages with "Specifications".

[codeboy2k]

Just thrown together in the last hour or so:
https://userstyles.org/styles/110933/analog-devices-unmodernized

Let me know if any pages are broken so I can see if it's fixable - or feel free to modify & redistribute

Still feel bad I couldn't figure out how to efficiently replace the "Features & Benefits" header on product pages with "Specifications".

nice! Thanks!

The only thing I changed locally was added a 2px margin on the body element.  Without that it was just a little too close to the edge of my screen for my liking

[German_EE]

I keep finding broken pages, with Adblock on or off. The latest is http://designtools.analog.com/dtDDSWeb/dtDDSMain.aspx which doesn't even work on my girlfriend's Windows 7 machine with IE.

[mrflibble]

I keep finding broken pages, with Adblock on or off. The latest is http://designtools.analog.com/dtDDSWeb/dtDDSMain.aspx which doesn't even work on my girlfriend's Windows 7 machine with IE.

Just tested that page with firefox and doesn't seem to work either. Cannot even select something in the "Select DDS" dropdown.

[atferrari]

I keep finding broken pages, with Adblock on or off. The latest is http://designtools.analog.com/dtDDSWeb/dtDDSMain.aspx which doesn't even work on my girlfriend's Windows 7 machine with IE.

Just tested that page with firefox and doesn't seem to work either. Cannot even select something in the "Select DDS" dropdown.

Tried it twice and works for me.

Opera - Win XP

[engineerbynight]

The DDS tool *was* down.  Worked last time I checked.

[larry42]

Anyone have conacts at AD at a higher up level? The new website is useless and find 'comparable parts' doesn't even list the part that one clicked from.

I plan to go over to LT for most of my design work (TI is so-so)

[c4757p]

LT has phenomenally expensive chips. You want to spend $7 on a bloody linear regulator? Go LT.

ADI has expensive chips, but not that expensive. I've used ADI linear regulators before because they had some specific, obscure spec I wanted, and they certainly didn't blow the BOM even if they made me cringe a bit. TI are even cheaper and just as good, but ADI has more obscure stuff.

[SArepairman]

hooray for linear.com