So it looks like the System Requirements page has had an overhaul on the website and I thought there'd be some value in gathering feedback in a similar manner to what happened with the graphics card driver page update. My thoughts;
- Finding it has got more difficult. It used to have its own line in the Support dropdown on the SW website, which is now missing.
- Heading to "Support Home" seems like a reasonable guess, at which point you're offered up this page;
This is the full view I get when first loading. To find any usable links, I immediately have to scroll down. The information density here is appalling. The spaces highlighted by the green rectangles could be deleted, which would push more of the actual, useful content of the page in to view when you first load it. Hell even the banner telling you what support is could probably be gotten rid of, or at least heavily compressed with a smaller font.
All this dead space might be popular among website designers but from an end user point of view it's just awful. - So we scroll down and get to a link for System Requirement. Again, lots of dead space but a bit less egregious here.
- Once again, awful information density, though something useful just about creeps on screen;
- And then the real changes kick in. Previously the requirements were provided in a clear and concise table where differences between versions were easily visible. Now there's this;
- Older versions are now hidden by default. Kind of understandable but still a bit inconvenient.
- The dark-grey-on-light-grey headers is terrible from an accessibility / usablity point of view.
- The "PDM Contributor / Viewer" header is ambiguous - I assume it's required system memory but clarification is needed. In fact context is a bit clearer on the previous version requirements as it's directly below the Memory requirement. Side note - why is the information order different between the current version and the earlier versions?
- The antivirus field in all cases is just "i" - this seems to be implying there should be a page footer somewhere with additional information (like the previous SysReq page) however no such information is available.
- The older versions Supported Virtual Environments lists are in a completely different order, making it harder to compare.
- Excel / Word version is now just listed as 2013 or later for all instances. For SW2018 is used to be the case that Office 2010 was also supported, is this no longer the case? Similarly, Office 365 has historically been problematic where Office updates get ahead of SW updates - have these problems been resolved?
