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As usual with this kind of thing, I've spent about five minutes looking round the site just to get a general feel of the thing. Here are my first impressions:
by christudor 11y ago
As usual with this kind of thing, I've spent about five minutes looking round the site just to get a general feel of the thing. Here are my first impressions:
1. This is a great idea. I'm /always/ looking for book recommendations and I find that Goodreads doesn't do the job for me.
2. Thank you for giving me a 'Not yet, I just want to look around' button. This turned a potentially irritating moment to a moment of 'Huh... that's a nice touch'.
3. I'm afraid I say that I think the design is horrible. Not necessarily layout, but more the CSS, e.g. the background colour, the style of the buttons, etc.
4. I think there's too much stuff in the navbar at the top. This includes a few things that I don't really know what to do with. It's all a bit cluttered, and that makes me a bit anxious. Couldn't this be stripped down a bit?
5. The menu is absolutely full of options, some of which seem a bit repetitive. I've got 'Edit my authors', 'Edit my channels', 'Personalise', etc. Isn't there a way all this kind of stuff can be put in one place?
6. When I click 'Edit authors', I'm not really sure why I have to do this on a separate page (or indeed why I'm telling you about /authors/ I like). Can't I just tell you which books I like?
7. I don't really know what 'My Articles' is. I wouldn't mind something that /only/ dealt with books.
8. Loading times are a /bit/ on the slow side, especially on the 'Recommendations' page.
Conclusion: Interesting idea, so I've signed up. For me, the biggest thing that needs to improve is the general look of the site (not necessarily layout, but the CSS), followed by the fact that everything feels a bit cluttered.
This is all just my opinion, though...!
- viking2917 11y agoThank you this is great feedback. I agree with you the navbar is kind of a mess. I've got a code branch in progress to clean that up substantially. I'm a recovering executive remembering how to code, and my design skills are awful. I have a designer friend giving me styling advice. It is too heavy. I was going for that hawaii feel but I think it's too much :) My articles is getting a revamp shortly - the gist is, just as you can get book recommendations, you can get article recommendations about books - kind of a Flipboard for Books or StumbleUpon for Books. But that feature is still formative....i.e. not really ready for primetime. Thanks for this. Keep it coming. You can find my email address on the About Us page if you want to send more.
- wink 11y agoACK on 2) - I was about to close it again when I saw the button to look around. I only did a few searches and sadly only found one of the books I recently read/started (and the only "well-known" one) - the one I didn't like that much.
- viking2917 11y agowhich books are we missing? want to take a look....thx.
- wink 11y agoFor example 'Spin' by Robert Charles Wilson and some other SciFi titles (not many I checked)
- viking2917 11y agoThanks for passing that along. Spin is actually in the system (http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Spin--by--Robert-Charles-Wilson--51483 http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Spin--by--Robert-Charle...) but I think my keyword search ranking approach isn't picking it up in the keyword search box...something to improve.