Simple and Social

Last week we ran a round of usability tests on Newsforwhatyoudo.com. Random folks in a coffee shop were invited to try out the app for the first time in exchange for a $10 coffee gift card. They were given a few common tasks to complete, but no other direction. We sat next to them watching what they did. When you see normal humans (i.e. people who don't live and breath social media and web development) use your app its like opening a door into another universe. A universe where all those bells, whistles, and knobs you wanted for your own usage becomes a source of confusion. Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think! describes a typical user viewing a web page as "driving by a billboard at 60 mph". Its an apt description of how users used our application.

The impact on our roadmap was interesting. Some features are just going away. Others are being combined, automated, or put under an "advanced" tab to reduce visual distraction. The two most important things people wanted were simplicity and social features. Simple doesn't imply an absence of function - in many cases it will require more functionality to make the complex simple. When reading the news, users don't want to use an application, they want to read the news and interact with their colleagues and friends. A successful application is one that is nearly invisible, while bringing content and social interaction to the fore.

The experience reinforced the need to regularly look at the UI and say "What can we remove, combine, or automate or hide?" Maybe once every 4 sprints, plan a "simplicity" sprint where the only objective is simplifying the user experience. Testing regularly with users helps, but ultimately the drive towards ease of use must come from the developers themselves. Facebook provides a good example for this process. On one hand Facebook and its thousands of third party developers have added mountains of new functionality. At the same time they're constantly simplifying the experience to make sure that the site doesn't become the next MySpace. Considering the UI experience, there's no better model than Google, which reduces the infinite complexity of the Internet down to one list of links given a few keywords.

On the social front we're planning Facebook integration and a new take on the collaborative reading experience. I think the best feature idea in our brainstorming exercise came from pushing hard on simplicity and social interaction as goals. What if we really examined every assumption about what a feed reader is and assumed the user only cared about content and social interaction? Could we design an highly relevant news experience if the user did nothing but read content and interact with their friends?

Yes we can.

Article Ranking Upgrade 1

Over the weekend we put a new release into production that significantly enhances the article ranking system. News articles are now ranked by inbound links, tweets, likes (on newsforwhatyoudo), reading frequency (on newsforwhatyoudo) and comments (on the blog itself). Together these elements give a decent sense for how important the community of blog readers thought the article was. News pages display articles first based on importance, and then if there's a batch of articles with similar rank, by date, allowing you to read what's important first. Thanks to the folks at Backtype.com that are providing tweet counts and some of the comment data.

The ranking system is growing in complexity - getting ranking to work on a per-group basis was interesting. There are many knobs that are begging to be turned, such as the relative weights of the various ranking elements - if you see something that just doesn't make sense, give a shout out.

Next on the agenda is a much needed interface upgrade that will allow you to read all the available articles at your own speed - currently we only display the top ranked ones.

New Features - History, Full Articles, and More

Over the last few days we rolled out several new features and some bug fixes. User feedback during our private beta indicated the most desired features were

• hiding read articles
  
• showing the whole article instead of just a snippet
  
• ability to email articles
• more interaction with peers, e.g. via an article commenting feature

This release addresses the first two features.

Our implementation is unusual in the feed reader world. Instead of just showing the full feed text, we launch another window and show the whole blog page in a frame, with controls at the top of the page. We chose this design for several reasons, the main one being that it provides the reader with not only the whole article, but also access to the comments on the article. Most other feed readers like Google Reader don't allow you to read comments along with articles, meaning you often miss the best part of a dialogue. Some aggregators like Friendfeed try to pull the dialogue into their own system. While this is tempting, this makes it harder to track the overall dialogue around an article because comments are now happening in multiple places. Another advantage of our approach is you get to see the actual web page instead of just the text in the feed, so if the page has interesting content in the sidebar its right there.

A potential downside is that you now are using two windows instead of one. One window allows you to quickly skim article summaries so you can figure out what you want to read. The other window lets you read the whole article, and also lets you walk through each article in the news feed one by one by using the back and next arrows in the frame header. We hope that this offers the best of both rapid skimming and in-depth reading/commenting.

Let us know what you think!

We're discussing implementation of the next feature - comments. As we noted earlier, we want to conversation around specific articles to remain in the blog's commenting system. But there are topic-specific rather than article-specific discussions that can occur, much like on IRC and discussion forums. So the current thinking is to have a user discussion/comment stream associated with each news topic in a group. Other ideas are welcome.

Logan

SF Ruby Meetup Beta Invite Ticket

Beta invite ticket for SF Ruby Meetup:

d5ed8b16668800139163747ce70526fb

paste this into the signup form at http://newsforwhatyoudo.com/signup

Just pushed a bunch of usability and topic filtering improvements to the site. Looking forward to feedback from the group.

Beta Invites for Ruby Meetup

Here's a beta ticket good for the first 60 users - for the April Silicon Valley Ruby Meetup.

e14700e02235e3e5b7bc3a7911fe4027

We'd love to hear your feedback.

Announcing use_uuid and acts_as_distributed

Today we open sourced two Rails plugins that facilitate building distributed Rails applications. Use_uuid integrates UUIDs and schema less attributes into rails models. Acts_as_distributed replicates state changes to model objects to a queue so they can be distributed to other databases and applications. Both of these plugins are currently in production in newsforwhatyoudo, and are tested with Rails 2.2

Rails is a great framework, but its not simple building a distributed application. These are two small steps towards making it easier. I'll be talking at the Silicon Valley Ruby Meetup about how we use these plugins. It would be great to collaborate with other developers on building out a collection of plugins that enabled all the key portions of distributing applications in an integrated way.

Private Beta Starts Today!

Private Beta starts today! Since the site's value is proportional to the number of users in a group, initially we're focused on getting a critical mass of users in a small number of groups. We're targeting real estate, ruby developers, and attorneys as a good mix of early and late adopters. First order of business is getting any usability and other bugs identified before opening up the site to more users.

We're also working on a comments controller that will allow users to comment on articles. If you have other feature suggestions let us know!