| Some suggestions because I would like to use the site more often but right now there is too much confusion going on (although I registered an account, which was probably the least confusing part :-): - to get the ball rolling as soon as a new user has signed up, lead him to one or two steps where he would pick some topics of interest of an alphabetic sorted list and then to the "customized" tab, where you show him three stories of a selected topic and explain what wonders the stars can do (problem with the star imho: in many other applications it's often used to bookmark something, which could be happening here; replace it with a simple "rate" and in the dropdown have just three options: "Read [more], [same], or [less/fewer] like this article.") - this "my" business gets confusing really fast; perhaps rename it to "topic (customized)" so you also get the connection to the "customized" (perhaps "personalized" is a better fit? It's also used already somewhere on the site) tag; also how do I switch between "my" and the normal view? Edit menu should have an option for this - more confusion: why can I only rate the first article (in the normal view not the expanded one) and what defines what is listed at the top? Do you also save sources, so I get more suggestions from the same source? If so, a better view to see and rate articles might be in order. I might even would consider adding an option to rate articles as well as stories. One could show that you are not at all interested in a HP prequel but that you like articles from perezhilton.com nevertheless. - in the popular tab: I can follow stuff easily but have to "edit" then "unfollow" - this might actual be a bug? - perhaps there is a technical reason for it but you seem to be afraid of too much text. Instead of "X articles" write out what the user can expect behind this link, like: "View 99 additional articles about this story" ("additional" seems to be correct or else your counting is off) or "View all 102 articles about this story" or even "View and rate 99 other articles about this story"; perhaps make it italic for same basic distinction - you already "open" new tabs when I select a topic-name but it is named "search" (probably due to your underlying js-structure, where everything is a search) and - you guessed it - it confused me. Why not rename it to the correct name (e.g.: my:entertainment; or if you did go for some of my suggestions: "entertainment (personalized)". Additional tabs for clicking instead of scrolling to get to a topic might also be nice to have - that the search tab is removed if I select another tab is intrusive and unexpected - unsorted feature suggestions: hide rated articles/stories as a setting for users; sort by time; a huge topics page (popular ones at the top, less popular ones at the bottom; both sorted by ABC) with an easy to use option (a simple + at the right end of the topic link would suffice) to select topics; later on suggest topics based on selected topics (yay, more data crunching); implement a "stream"-view where instead of sorted by topics it's sorted by time just using topics you follow - bug? when I remove a rating I get a 3 next to the star but there is no actual rating - replace stars with hearts - have you not heard the news? I'm kidding with this one Sorry for probably confusing you too with my unsorted babble. |
The two items you call out as possible bugs are, embarrassingly enough, working as intended although I can see how the UX at those points is sufficiently confusing that one might reasonably assume them bugs. For instance, the rating showing up for an article no longer rated - that is the predicted rating for the article. As you start to rate articles in a topic, we show the predicted number of stars for all articles you haven't rated. This can be useful to know (e.g. the ML learns the most from the manual ratings that differ from what it would otherwise predict). The visual distinction between these predicted ratings and your explicit ratings is that the star by the number is filled in for your actual ratings. So the UX problem is that there is no way to know that is what the filled-in / not-filled-in star means. Anyway, will try to improve this.
Amount of UI text is tricky. There is value in both clarity and terseness, and it's a balance I don't always get right.
The ratings are per-article, not per-story, so a rating dropdown guy for the non-primary articles of a story almost certainly should be added. Excellent point.
And sorry about missing the hearts over stars trend. We're hopelessly uncool. Hell, we still love c++.