 |
‹ | How to Make an Oldsk00l Text Adventure Game | < | Weekly Archives | > | Nielsen: Qualitative Is Better Than Quantitative | › |  |
 |
 |
Newsable Redesign Mockups and a Request for Feedback
design, usability
March 08, 2004, 10:07 PM
I'm working on giving Newsable a facelift soon, both to improve the interaction and visual design. I've posted some mockups of the new key screens; if you're the sort of person who likes to speak words about other people's work, then here's your chance to speak some words about mine. My goals with this release are to make the visual design a little more pleasing and to improve the interaction for people who are subscribed to a large number of feeds. Also, I hope to convince Kenneth that the three-pane format isn't the be all and end all of aggregator design.
I'm also working on the design of a community system that will help facilitate a usable open source software process. The design is based on the research I did last semester in CSCW. If this sounds intriguing to you, stay tuned for more.
Posted by Andyed on March 09, 2004 at 09:36 AM
New design looks great. In the interest of ease of startup and no lockin, import/export of subscriptions lists to opml or some such would be greatly appreciated.
I have mixed feelings about the new layouts as I dramatically prefer regular repeated reading to happen in the newest to oldest view, with feed sources merged. So few other aggregators accomplish this, please don't disable it.
Posted by Rob on March 09, 2004 at 06:15 PM
Yeah, I agree that OPML import / export would be a great feature; I just haven't had the time to implement it yet. Anyone know of a decent OPML parser module for Perl?
Good point about the interleaved stories. Perhaps I can put in a preference for that behavior. I'm trying to avoid preference-overload, but for the moment it seems safe.
Posted by Geoff on March 10, 2004 at 11:31 PM
Hey, Rob. I really like the new design, it's an excellent feel.
I would second letting users choose between stories grouped by source or interleaving them. For someone like me who checks Newsable infrequently, and is subscribed to both relatively low-volume feeds (e.g., my website *sheepish look*) and high-volume (e.g., BBC news, with dozens of entries every day), it's nice to be able to see them separated by source, so the low-volume feeds don't get lost in the noise. I can see how people with different reading habits might feel differently, though.
Posted by Andyed on March 11, 2004 at 12:07 AM
...imagines a gestural mechanism for scattering feeds from headline view into chronological organization and the inline DOM code to do it...
I'd love to see a serious analysis of the Zoomracks patent and a rapid move to uncovered functionality in the "scattered cards" ui mode.
Just brainstorming, but seriously think outside the page here. It's darn easy to show/hide these days. I'd be happy with the headline view if I could easily expand a recent post. I'd even settle for load on demand via a document.createElement("script"), element.setAttribute("src", "newsable.org?feed=7&item=8").
That said, I do get a lot of value out of the interleaved view for rapid-scan using the space bar to scroll. Particularly for my topical feedster searches (see http://surfmind.com/musings/gems/forumzilla_feedster.gif) where the feed is high-frequency, sometimes irrelevant, and titles & sources are less informative as new feeds show up frequently.
Keyboard navigation with n)ext, p)revious, e)xpand, c)ollapse could really help for either organization. Explicitly embedding focus into the system would allow the application to move towards the "attention.xml" notion and all sorts of fun adaptivity and collaborative filtering (based upon time in focus).