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Each week Adam & Ste focus on a specific feature, idea or prototype in Hardcover and iterate on it together or with guests.
adam (00:03.03)
Hey, hey, how's it going?
ste (00:05.134)
Hello! Good, good! How about you? All good?
adam (00:10.178)
Pretty good, just as I was saying before we started recording, just recovering from Sundance after a week of volunteering and seeing way too many movies.
ste (00:21.853)
Yeah, 40 hours a day, right? Oh, a week. 40 hours a day would be much.
adam (00:25.31)
Yeah. The nice part is that I think I probably saw like 10 movies or eight, maybe, maybe eight movies while I was volunteering. So I was able to just like sneak into the back and stamp people's hands as they were coming in and going out of the theater and watch some movies, which was fun.
ste (00:46.35)
That's nice, that's nice. Yeah, I've been to see the Fable months over the weekend and I haven't... Did you see it by the way? I'm not gonna give you any spoilers.
adam (00:57.754)
No, I know the premise, but I haven't seen it.
ste (01:00.342)
Yeah, it's really nice. I mean, I'll just say that. Really good movie.
adam (01:04.912)
Okay.
Every year we do like an Oscars party and we print out like ballots for people to guess and keep track of like how people are doing, kind of like a fantasy football league for the Oscars basically.
ste (01:21.158)
Oh, that's nice. Like just a bunch of you and your friends. Is it like the guessing game where you have to put something on your forehead and just guess the movie or something like that? Or...
adam (01:22.295)
I'm going to go to sleep.
adam (01:30.607)
More like, uh, there's like the, um, every year, right. Right. Valley fair variety, variety fairs. One of the, one of the big magazines has like, uh, uh, like here's the best picture and here are the options. And you like check off which one you think it's going to be. And then, so we, we all do that beforehand. Like make our predictions.
ste (01:47.902)
Okay, I gotcha. Oh, nice, like a betting game, right? Ah, that's cool. That's cool. Who's getting better scores? You or Maryland?
adam (01:54.295)
Yeah.
adam (02:00.687)
Um, I think I've won most years, but Marylin won last year. And so she's a, she's the reigning champion.
ste (02:08.831)
That's nice. That's cool. Great. And well, just chilling, taking it easy. Also, you know, trying to work on as much stuff. Sorry, there's an ambulance right behind me. Yeah, trying to work on some stuff for hardcover, trying to work on some stuff for other projects. Yeah, sorry, they are strong. So, yeah.
adam (02:13.334)
What have you been up to?
ste (02:37.318)
It's been pretty good. January is always so long, isn't it? I don't know. Am I the only one feeling it's pretty long or?
adam (02:45.214)
Yeah, it's, it's felt like a lot going on in a month, but I think I kind of also jumped between projects like, and it makes it hard to get like really deep into one thing when I'm like jumping between things. So yeah, kind of looking, looking forward to it being over and then jumping more deep into one thing.
ste (02:58.024)
Yeah.
ste (03:03.926)
Yeah, exactly. I think it's kind of like a prep month for like the whole year where you're kind of like establishing stuff where everything goes. That's why maybe it seems like it's so so long. But you know then we'll have February and usually it's it'll pass like not that we want to. Nice.
adam (03:23.582)
Are you the kind of person who makes like New Year's resolutions or that kind of thing?
ste (03:28.246)
Uh, I got a couple. I got a couple. Reading more is one of my nearest resolution and so far it's been going good. I seen that Warren Buffett tweets where it kind of like goes, you know, the usual, everything compounds and it was like 50 pages a day amount to whatever. Hundred. Yeah. Thousands at the end of the year. So yeah, I'm trying to stick to that. The Warren Buffett diet. Yeah. How about you?
How are your years resolutions going so far?
adam (04:03.062)
Uh, some of them better than others, but, uh, yeah, I think for me, one of the ones that I've been trying to do is like in the morning, not spend time on any kind of social media or news and kind of just wake up with like reading in the morning. And I feel like I'm better at that on days when I'm not like volunteering or, you know, going out and being, if it's not a very active day, if I'm able to like kind of ease into the day and not like.
ste (04:15.747)
Good one.
ste (04:32.151)
Yeah.
adam (04:33.15)
Okay, at this time, I got to get out the door anyways. But yeah, that's been a nice way to start the day.
ste (04:40.094)
Yeah, that's a big one. That's a big one. I've seen, I think it's on many people's lists together with reading more. So yeah, I mean, takes a lot of energy with all the stuff going on nowadays, you know, to just keep away from it, but pays off, I guess.
adam (04:54.926)
Thanks for watching!
adam (05:00.766)
Yeah. Yeah. I, I'll often get sucked into like reading the New York Times or like reading current news and, um, I, I left Twitter a couple of months ago, but I'm still like reading news on mastodon now. So it's, it's really just, you know, there's, there's going to be people that are passionate on whatever platform you're on.
ste (05:21.83)
Oh yeah, I mean, yeah, I was about to ask if it's not like the same, like if it doesn't eventually get the same as on Twitter because, you know, kind of seems like the same, you know, dynamics of the whole thing. But I don't know. Is it?
adam (05:36.402)
Yeah. I think I've really only seen people who are like, maybe outraged in the same way as I am. While on Twitter there might be people who are outraged in many different ways.
ste (05:51.352)
In all the ways, yeah.
adam (05:52.69)
Yeah, whether that's good or bad to be determined, but it's a nice group of people on mastelon. So that's been very nice at least.
ste (05:56.642)
Yeah.
That's cool. Yeah, that at least you know, it keeps you know on a certain subject Yeah, I've gotten used to all the rage. It's just I try to take it in a funny way, you know
adam (06:04.058)
Yeah, exactly.
adam (06:13.422)
It's like Bane, like I was born in the rage.
ste (06:17.21)
Yeah, exactly. You get used to it. Yeah. Nice. Should we jump in our Day-D-Weekly thing that we're working on for Hardcover? I got some nice... I had two interviews, one with Nygmatilium and one with Leisure. They're for context to two of our early users who stuck by us. So, yeah.
adam (06:19.699)
Yeah
adam (06:28.844)
Yeah.
I'm done.
ste (06:45.51)
It was really interesting to hear what they had to say about our whole journey, you know, being able to see it since the early days, which is 2021. Not that far long ago, but that's far long ago. So yeah.
adam (07:02.35)
Hehehe
adam (07:07.342)
Nice. Any takeaways that kind of stuck with you?
ste (07:12.322)
Oh, yeah. I mean, generally, I had a set of questions about what we're working on, about the new book tracking, about the tags and genres, and about the new book reviews, but also about hardcover in general and what they actually use it for and how they use
other book apps. And I think what was surprising to me is how different the habits were and the opinions on what we were building between the two calls. And I think it's a great lesson on how to get information from, you know, the people who are seeing us build and how we make those decisions.
when there's things that are, oh, sorry, I think my TV went off. When there are things that are in contradiction related to what people think of what we're building. So somebody might say, oh, I really love that. And then you have somebody who says, oh, no, that thing never like in a million years.
adam (08:35.405)
50 and yeah
ste (08:38.086)
you're like, okay, what are we supposed to do in this case? So, yeah.
adam (08:45.054)
Yeah, that's, that's something that I've noticed too, especially for like the, uh, like progress tracking and like how people, like what touch points people have when they're tracking what they read. Cause some people just want to track like what they want to read and then what they've read and some people want to track what they want to read and then they want to say like, I'm currently reading this and then I've read it. And other people want to go a step farther and say, I'm currently reading this and then they want to say, I'm 5% done, I'm 10% done, I'm 20% done.
ste (08:56.891)
Mm-hmm.
ste (09:01.712)
Mm-hmm.
adam (09:15.274)
I'm done. So it's like, there's a variety of touch points from like red to like basically an unlimited amount.
ste (09:16.492)
Yeah.
ste (09:25.63)
Yeah, exactly. That's like our current dilemma. And that's exactly the feedback I got on the calls, which were both great. And I got a lot of really, really useful feedback. But for instance, in one of the calls, I'm not going to name who.
ste (09:50.714)
they were using an app while they were reading. And so yeah, the two cases, doing stuff while you're reading with the use of an app or doing stuff exclusively after you're reading and you know, every moment in between. So yeah, it's interesting how we get that and translate it into what we're building and actually into Harkuff.
adam (10:23.414)
much more research to do on that for sure. But it sounds, but yeah, cool.
ste (10:26.578)
Yeah, exactly. Should we jump in the actual designs? And I think I left a few comments based on the calls in there. I can be a bit more specific than, you know, yeah. Cool, great.
adam (10:38.402)
Yeah.
Yeah, I wanna, do you wanna share your screen and we'll go from there?
ste (10:45.266)
Yeah, of course. Let me share my screen. Yeah.
adam (10:47.639)
I'm going to try this.
ste (10:52.898)
Okay.
Aqui vamos nós!
ste (11:02.854)
Todo mundo vê isso? Me diga, você é o que?
adam (11:06.587)
I can. Yes.
ste (11:11.037)
Okay.
adam (11:11.326)
I'll probably just open Figma on my own too. Okay.
ste (11:15.67)
Oh yeah, perfect. Yeah, so the first question I asked was just seeing this, what was the initial impression? We talked about this being probably having a lot of actions in this drawer. So I think what we wanted to do was
like confirm is that readers wouldn't get confused. And I got good feedback based on this. Ligia mentioned having an option for owned books and maybe we can start with that because just everyone for context, maybe we should do that intro, right Adam? To tell everyone what this actually is.
adam (12:07.83)
Like what this drawer is.
ste (12:10.262)
Yeah, yeah, what we're working on.
adam (12:14.59)
Yeah, so, yeah, you want me to give a quick overview on that?
ste (12:21.198)
Yeah, go for it.
adam (12:23.122)
Yes. So, um, across hardcover, whenever you're interacting with a book, you might be, um, like saving it for later or kind of setting your status on it, or perhaps managing lists for that book or, uh, metadata about the book, like your review, um, whether it's public or private. So we've been, this has kind of been our way we've been doing it since the start with what we initially called this, uh, book status button.
You should probably just call it like the book button, but, uh, and the book button and, uh, this, uh, book button is kind of a reader's way of interacting with the book in this experience. No matter where you see the book, whether it's in search on the feed, um, on someone else's list. It's, it's kind of like the unified way so that you don't have to like, go all the way to the book page to interact with the book, you can kind of do it from wherever you're seeing that book.
ste (12:55.194)
book plan.
adam (13:23.834)
And this drawer is kind of our more mobile-friendly native way of doing that. And that's what we're iterating from, or iterating to from our kind of drop-down that we have right now. Does that kind of cover it?
ste (13:38.498)
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Uh, so this is a big drawer as you can see, and, uh, yeah, it's BookButton Central. The BookButton is a really good name for it, Adam, by the way. Uh, it's like our Facebook moment, you know, when, uh, the guy, what was the, uh, Napster guy told Zuckerberg, dub the Duh, the Duh, it's just Facebook.
adam (14:03.306)
Yeah.
ste (14:07.462)
This is the book button, the book button, everything you... Yeah, exactly, not the hardcover. We had that debate as well. Remember the early days. It's so funny, you know, how things come into, you know, being through like that stream of little decisions. But anyway, returning to the book button. So yeah, as you can see, lots of stuff going on here. Yeah.
adam (14:10.73)
Not that hardcover.
adam (14:27.511)
Mm-hmm.
ste (14:35.414)
In one of the calls, Dija mentioned a way to mark the book as owned. So I'm assuming that is after that was read or if it's a book. Yeah, that is. So you click on one to read, let's say you buy the book or, yeah, either in
adam (14:43.643)
Mm-hmm.
ste (15:04.366)
whatever format and yeah, then you want to market as zoned. And I was wondering, should that go anywhere in here? Uh, or should it go someplace else? That was a good question. Yeah.
adam (15:14.757)
Hmm
adam (15:18.534)
Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's one that we, we, uh, we actually import an owned Boolean from, I think Goodreads and Storygraph both. So we're already like storing whether or not they own a book in our database. But right now, one of the tricky parts is that, um, books that people own are at the addition level and this modal or this, uh, drawer is at the book level. So like.
We don't have a good way. Originally we actually had a toggle up here at the top, which was like an owned or not, and, and either it was like one or the other, but I, I got rid of that because it, it doesn't show the specificity of what edition of the book you're owning. So if we did do something with book ownership, we would need to find a way to tie it to additions the same way we do for what books you've read.
ste (15:55.134)
Oh yeah.
ste (16:17.258)
Nice. So somewhere over here, I'm presuming where you'd actually be able to mark the addition. Right.
adam (16:27.014)
Yeah, it would, it would be some flow similar to this, but I don't think it would be related to a status like, uh, when you've read it, because it might just be a book that you got as a gift and it's just kind of sitting on your shelf. And you want to have like a record that that book's on yourself, but you haven't read it and yeah. So it's a, it's a tricky problem.
ste (16:41.358)
Yeah.
ste (16:50.87)
Yeah, I'm wondering if that couldn't be done through. So let's say you wanna like mimic your bookshelf on hardcover. Maybe that could be a list of owned books where you could add stuff. So just putting it out there, it's definitely something we don't have to look into right now, but maybe that I'm thinking, you know, if I had, if I wanted to basically see my
adam (17:05.175)
Hmm
ste (17:20.526)
digital version of my library, that would basically be a list and a shelf view. So I could see like all the books technically in the shelf and I could say, oh, look, this is just like the shelves I have at home. So yeah, I'm guessing that could be tied somehow, but I'm just noting it down for later on.
adam (17:42.254)
Yeah.
adam (17:48.294)
Yeah, I think I was checking our user roadmap, the one that people can like upvote features they want. Because that's like, I feel like once enough people request book ownership, that's one we'll probably have to focus some time on, but currently progress tracking for what you're currently reading is still like, is still our number one. So I feel like we could.
ste (17:59.876)
Mm-hmm.
ste (18:08.986)
Hmm. Yeah.
ste (18:17.316)
Yeah.
adam (18:18.306)
Continue on this, but with the ownership as something to think about for later.
ste (18:23.594)
Yeah, that's a good call. Great. On to the next one then. Somehow adding a book to a list got flagged as something that could be moved more up top. And yeah, I wanted to ask you if you'd see the need for that. And as a secondary question, the remove...
button, which basically removes a book from your library. So every interaction you had with it, it wouldn't appear in the feed. It wouldn't, yeah, it wouldn't look like you read it. Should it sit like on the same level as the statuses or should it be moved somewhere else entirely? What do you think? That's another thing that popped up and I wanted your opinion on this.
adam (19:16.058)
Yeah.
adam (19:20.574)
Yeah, it does feel like it doesn't belong with all the other ones, because the other ones are changing the status, and that's deleting it altogether. I think one of the reasons why we didn't have it up there initially was because it could accidentally be clicked, but I feel like if we have it somewhere where it at least shows a confirmation when they click it, it'll solve that.
ste (19:37.37)
That's true.
ste (19:47.382)
Yeah, I also thought about the confirmation, but being in this drawer type of experience, I'm thinking a confirmation on top of the drawer would be a bit weird. So maybe, I mean, I'm a fan of just putting it in a place where you can quickly remove your interactions. I sometimes did this on the app.
I accidentally clicked the want to read button and I wanted that removed from everywhere. And I managed to do that. But having the remove button really handy so that I could quickly do that, like as quick as I missed that on the app, would be a thing.
adam (20:24.238)
Hmm.
ste (20:43.17)
Yeah, for me at least, would you think that would be the case or would you rather have the remove button somewhere with a confirmation to remove it?
adam (20:56.11)
I think it might, like right now, I think we only show a confirmation if you've done more than just mark it as want to read. Like if you've rated it, if you've written a review, I think those are the two things. So maybe we only show a confirmation if you've done a little bit more than just marked it as want to read.
ste (21:07.846)
Hmm.
ste (21:17.822)
OK, that sounds good. How about its position? Yeah.
adam (21:19.402)
That way, that way we're not like, uh, yeah. Um, I feel like I like it at the top more for mobile because then like your thumb is so far away from the, that top area.
ste (21:37.658)
That's true. How about making it less prominent? And so you could see it, but it wouldn't stand out. I'm just worried that it would interfere. How about this?
adam (21:39.106)
See ya.
adam (21:58.782)
Yeah, I think that looks good.
adam (22:04.698)
And especially since the, I think the current book status button, um, we have to like have an X right there for like exiting it. But for this, we don't really need that as much. Oh wait, no, we don't really need that anyways. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that, I think that works.
ste (22:24.246)
Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah.
ste (22:30.994)
Okay, we can leave it there for now. And if we get any better ideas as it settles, we can move it. I'm just going to move this further down. By the way, I actually started implementing this and testing it with the actual drawer. And it works pretty nicely. I can show you. Where is it? Is it here? Ah, here we go. But let me do that for mobile. So, Hey, this is how it's.
adam (22:52.778)
Nice.
adam (22:58.066)
Oh, I think we're still seeing your, oh, no, there you go. I just had my other tab up. Okay, wait, can you show it again? Oh, nice.
ste (23:04.254)
Oh, wait. OK, here we go. Oh, yeah.
ste (23:12.102)
So here we go. It's, yeah, wait, I should load this again.
ste (23:20.15)
It has a few glitches. I'm gonna ask Eugene for help on some of those. Close this one, but yeah, the drawer works and it shouldn't scroll for once and it should come over the bottom navigation and the top navigation, but else, yeah, it's pretty good. And it works with taps. So I'm gonna ask.
adam (23:34.146)
Yeah.
adam (23:47.989)
Nice.
ste (23:48.718)
you and Eugene to check the library again to make sure it's pretty good. But on the first glance, yeah, if it was easy enough for me to implement it, I'm guessing it's pretty okay. But, you know, just double check it.
adam (24:02.082)
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm wondering for like the desktop side, do you think we'll use the same thing or kind of stick towards like the button drop down?
ste (24:14.438)
Oh, no. Yeah, that's going to be a popover. And I'll basically make a version with all of these. Wait, I got it in Figma. So it's going to be basically this, a smaller version of that.
adam (24:29.12)
Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah.
ste (24:32.006)
How does that look?
adam (24:35.798)
I like that. One thing that I was thinking was about, OK. Yeah, I really like the border around it, too. It has a lot more definition than the current style.
ste (24:54.53)
Yeah, I had some inspiration from letterbox. I wanted something, you know, that makes it stand out, but a bit subtler than, you know.
just having it there.
adam (25:07.979)
Yeah. One, one like thing that just came to mind as like, I don't know if this will make it better or worse, but something like, Well, not that. Let me undo this.
adam (25:26.122)
Okay, pen tool.
ste (25:27.102)
That's classic Sigma.
adam (25:30.322)
Yeah, like click the pencil and then it starts from who knows where, where it goes like.
adam (25:42.626)
Something like that, where it's pointing back up.
ste (25:45.954)
Okay, whether it has an actual, yeah, yeah, yeah, pointer. Let me make this the same. Whoop, it's got some border radius and we don't want that. Yeah.
adam (25:56.858)
Oh yeah, you can just do it like do, do, do.
ste (25:59.99)
Well, I got the same amount of experience you do have as a coder for design. So here we go. Well yeah, it's going to be without this border, but see, this is the one thing in FIG 1 that's tough to...
adam (26:09.513)
Uh.
adam (26:16.279)
Yeah.
ste (26:20.794)
Tough to make, but yeah, it works. Yeah, without the bottom border, they don't support like shapes with just some edges, hopefully. I think I even mentioned that on their Discord at some point where I got frustrated, but anyways, yeah.
adam (26:21.958)
Oh yeah, like without the bottom border. Yeah.
adam (26:35.48)
I think.
I think like I've seen in a sketch, like you can select the two of them and like do like the union of the two objects or something like that to create like.
ste (26:47.766)
Yeah, you can do it with the union. You can even duplicate the thingy and have it without the border. But yeah, it's a bit messier. I'd rather it just not have the bottom border. But yeah, anyway, this is how it would look like. Maybe if we put the remove down the bottom, in this case, it would work better. So we just have...
ste (27:21.738)
Anyways, basically this let's do it the slow manual way Sometimes you gotta do that
adam (27:32.042)
Hehehe
ste (27:35.432)
Just put this here. There we go. With the right spacing of course.
adam (27:39.534)
Yeah. Maybe we could even take away this line right here since genres, oh no, I messed it up. Okay. Since lists and genres are kind of like sibling ideas, they could even, or do you think they need a line between them?
ste (27:52.838)
Oh, no, that's fine. Can always control Z.
ste (28:01.134)
Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
ste (28:08.466)
Uh, no, I'm wondering, uh, over here, wouldn't journals and texts be actually more associated with writing a review? Because I was thinking the same thing you did for list, but actually for, uh, write a review, but I'm not really that sure. I'm just asking.
adam (28:18.644)
Mm.
adam (28:29.35)
Yeah, I see it as like writing a review is like your, your take on it while lists and genres and tags and moods are kind of like, uh, taxonomy and organization for the book. But, but then again, they all kind of, but, but like the moment of interaction is kind of all the same. Like you might, you might do all of these actions at once. You might read a book, write a review, add it to a list, and then add some genres.
ste (28:42.734)
Yeah, that's good description. Yeah.
ste (29:01.634)
Yeah, but I think that's good based on your explanation. That was a good one. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, we can just leave it at that. And let's remove this from this one as well. And yeah, it should maybe have a thing like this over here as well. Or actually because you go in on a separate screen and you're not just...
adam (29:01.774)
but yeah.
adam (29:10.337)
Yeah, this is looking good.
adam (29:23.913)
Oh yeah.
ste (29:31.462)
to, yeah, that's something to think about. I think it got left there when it was in the drawer, but right now we're making this go to another screen, right? So maybe it shouldn't be, if it's a button and not the thing that navigates to the same thing inside the drawer, should we have this arrow or should we just ditch it? But it would mean the same for writer review. Hmm?
adam (29:37.841)
Mmm.
adam (29:59.998)
I think, yeah, it's, yeah, that's a good question. Like if it's still part of the drawer or if it's like a, a screen that shows up on top of this, then I think the arrow makes sense because it's like a tapping all the other ones, like tapping, want to read, like that doesn't, that doesn't leave this button at all. That, that just changes a, uh, changes the state of the button. Same for like review or privacy.
ste (30:14.114)
Mm-hmm.
adam (30:29.366)
But clicking on write a review, add to list, or genres and tags takes you to a different page. So I think it makes sense to keep the little arrow there.
ste (30:38.818)
Okay.
ste (30:42.178)
Yeah, for all of them, right? I mean, if we could get from one, for one, we should keep it for all of them, I'm guessing. So, yeah.
adam (30:43.682)
Kind of like a.
adam (30:49.871)
Yeah, like whenever we whenever we leave the this screen
ste (30:55.618)
Yeah, red takes you here and then clicking edit takes you here. So yeah, that makes sense.
And general syntax takes you here, and you got a back button, and at the list actually takes you to the list dialog we have right now. So...
adam (31:08.024)
Mm-hmm.
adam (31:21.868)
Mm-hmm.
ste (31:24.15)
Yeah, I'm thinking this works.
adam (31:25.182)
Yeah, I think that all makes sense. Yeah.
ste (31:28.902)
Cool, great. Well, it looks the same over here. And yeah, I'll just make all of the things in here adapt to a bigger size, which is now the other way around. We've got to make them a bit smaller for desktop.
adam (31:50.73)
Yeah, makes sense.
ste (31:50.766)
But yeah, it's the same thing, yeah.
adam (31:55.294)
For the, the rating part, I was wondering about how big that should be on mobile. Cause that's, I've been, uh, tracking a lot of things on letterbox this week and kind of getting used to their rating component, which has been good. Cause it's like the rain. It's like a, it's like, it behaves like a slider, which is what we're talking about changing ours too, as well. Um, and I think.
ste (32:12.329)
Mm-hmm.
ste (32:20.751)
Mm-hmm.
adam (32:24.842)
I think that width is going to be plenty for it.
ste (32:28.178)
Yeah, plus if we look over here, I think we can spread these out a bit more. So wait, where do I have the stars? Stars, stars, stars, sorry. This is like, yeah, designers coding is messy, but I think I can, flags, gap one. Let's see if I have a gap, if it makes it better.
now it actually made it worse.
Yeah, see, yeah, actually on mobile, there's plenty of space apparently, much more than in my design, I don't know why. So yeah, it kind of looks good, not iPad mini, I was going for a really small one. Yeah, so this is how it looks on an iPhone 6. So it should be plenty of room to move.
but we can tweak it. We can even increase the gap so it's like even wider. And yeah, with the slider, it should be pretty okay to move the stars, right? So there's extra space, not like in my initial design over here. So I think we can play around with the size of the actual stars until we get it right.
adam (33:47.315)
Yeah.
adam (33:58.741)
Sounds good.
And yeah, it sounds like this is a good, a good time to cut the, the feature for, um, like more like this or less like this.
ste (34:02.167)
Nice.
ste (34:12.402)
Yeah, I think, yeah, exactly. That's a really good one, but I had another idea. I was gonna talk about the, with the whole team with, maybe it's, that's gonna appear in the review process rather than, I mean, definitely we're ditching it over here, but maybe it can be part of the review process or it can even be a.
adam (34:13.11)
Like the thumbs up, thumbs down.
ste (34:40.454)
prompt after you finish reading the book.
ste (34:47.47)
But I'll show you what I mean. I was actually thinking of something like, this, like just a popover, of course, with another subject, but after you, market book has finished, just have this popover asking you, do you want us to recommend more like this? So it can be a bump up or down for a specific book.
adam (34:48.253)
Hmm
ste (35:17.198)
so we can get the better match score. If it helps Mariana and Alicia actually get a better match score using that piece of info, which I'm guessing it does, right?
adam (35:32.318)
I think it does. I think the, the problem so far is that few people end up using it, like, in a way that is different from the rating. So that's one of, that's been one of the tricky parts. It's like, rating as a whole doesn't tell you whether or not someone wants more books like that, but most people treat it, treat them the same.
So yeah, I'm still on the fence on like, will people actually use this to like really like say they love it?
ste (36:00.976)
Yeah.
ste (36:09.206)
Yeah, true. Well, that's a story for another time. Right now we're removing it for this flow at least. So yeah.
adam (36:18.814)
Yeah, makes sense.
ste (36:21.459)
Nice.
adam (36:23.038)
I mean, like, I think about like every platforms like been through like many iterations on this, like, you know, YouTube had stars and went to thumbs up and, you know, Netflix had ratings and then went to thumbs up and thumbs down, but they, they're very like, uh, recommendation focused while for us, people really want to know what their rating was for a book. Like that's the most important part.
ste (36:39.397)
Yeah.
ste (36:51.118)
Yep, exactly. Yeah. I mean, people don't write reviews on Netflix. They write them on Letterboxd. So, yeah, that's like... I've been through Letterboxd's review system, by the way, and I think it's really cool. We can do it a bit cleaner, I'm thinking. They have like three drawers opening up on top of each other. I was thinking that we could actually...
adam (37:00.257)
Yep.
ste (37:18.102)
I didn't find a way to do it, but maybe it's good Homer for either you or Eugene. I'm trying to see if I can replicate the Apple transitions, you know, where this, when you click on something, this actually moves a bit to the, so it gets pushed while its transparency starts going down and this one appears. So that's push.
adam (37:37.147)
Mmm.
ste (37:47.686)
out and push in interaction. I'm trying to see if something like this.
adam (38:00.194)
It's like a slide over.
ste (38:03.178)
Yeah, exactly. So when you click on, let's say you read, this would go like this. And it's a neat transition where it's paid out and this comes in. Yeah, I was thinking about, you know, I saw it's using React router for some pages, but it shouldn't use it for this. I don't know. Maybe you can have a look into it, or I can ask Eugene to look into it.
adam (38:11.744)
Mmm.
ste (38:30.806)
It's a cool transition and we can use it for other stuff as well. I'm thinking just this it's called continuity. Yeah.
adam (38:31.679)
Yeah.
adam (38:39.283)
Yeah, I think we could even use the headless UI transition elements that we're currently using for some transitions. And it'll just be like sliding to left negative 100 and from negative 100. And I think doing something like that might work.
ste (38:58.946)
Oh yeah!
ste (39:04.246)
Oh yeah, I totally forgot about transitions. Okay, yeah, yeah, that'd be nice. And we also use frame or motion. So if it doesn't work with that, we can also use that one. But yeah, if it works with the headless UI transitions, that'd be like super. Yeah, it's just pushing this out while opacity goes to zero and...
adam (39:22.815)
Yeah.
ste (39:32.034)
I'm guessing this would be rendered at the same time, right? Though, so you'd get all the screens or not. I don't know. I mean, it doesn't matter. Yeah.
adam (39:40.646)
Yeah. Yeah, that would be a tricky part because like right now we kind of like just replace the screen, we're not like loading two of them and doing a transition. Yeah. But I think it's worth it. Yeah.
ste (39:50.106)
Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely worth it because, for instance, if you click on red right here and this drop down, this drawer goes down and then it goes back up again, I think that's not like the ideal transition. If we do this nifty like thing where, yeah, it slides and pushes the content over. Yeah, sorry, that was my description of it.
Sim, talvez nós podemos conseguir isso.
adam (40:25.098)
Yeah, I like that.
ste (40:25.85)
Okay, cool. Then let's jump to this one because this one was an interesting one. So on one of the calls, the feedback was that all of the fields, it's better to have all of the fields on the same page, including this. On the other call, the separate steps for each...
let's say stage of writing the review. So actually writing the review, adding the links and then adding the tags separately seemed like the more let's say.
ste (41:14.266)
risky way to have a review, mainly because we had that happen when people wrote reviews and they misclicked or they clicked somewhere else or they tapped somewhere else and the review was gone. So this one seemed like better on one call and this one seemed better for the same reason with the other call. So this is like one of those decisions where you get...
adam (41:22.67)
Hmm.
adam (41:27.951)
I see.
ste (41:44.002)
I feedback, which is valid and really useful, but for like doing things very different, so basically opposing things. So I don't know, how should we approach it? I mean, what are you a fan of? If you're writing a review, would you rather split it into steps or like have it all?
adam (42:06.921)
Hmm.
ste (42:13.828)
on the same.
adam (42:15.624)
Um...
adam (42:20.01)
I think, I think like I as a user would probably like 90% of the time only use the first tab of stuff. Like I might not, like I would, I wouldn't, I don't have like a blog so I wouldn't be in the second one. And if the review date defaulted to the date that I was writing it, I wouldn't need to set that in the first place. And I probably would only add tags if like this book didn't have any already.
Like if I was the first person reading it and I'm doing something, but I think we want people to like just click on a couple of tabs. Like ideally we want them to say like, yep, I agree this book's sci-fi. Yep, I agree this book's like emotional adventure. So I could even see that. I could even see like that.
ste (43:06.062)
Mm-hmm
Yeah, by the way, this feature, yeah.
adam (43:20.286)
Yeah. Yeah. It's a hard one. I'm not, I'm, I'm still not sure.
ste (43:25.691)
Yeah, tough dilemma. Well, I kind of like this one. See, my only observation with it is that tabs aren't associated with steps, so tabs aren't something you'd use in UI in general. We could use a stepper, so we'd have review.
and then links and then tags as steps. So it would be like step one, step two, step three. But...
ste (44:03.99)
I'm wondering if we go for this, I don't know, we didn't know you as a user to actually click.
ste (44:13.741)
the button two times to be able to publish the review.
adam (44:18.554)
Yeah, that's what I'd worry about too. I think.
adam (44:29.842)
I think it would be a lot of work. But then again, if you're writing a review, you're likely already doing a lot of work. Like, these other two pages are going to be very little work compared to the act of writing a review.
ste (44:32.406)
Mm-hmm
ste (44:42.298)
this one. Yeah.
adam (44:44.662)
Like, cause you're already committing to like that part. So these other two screens will like fly by.
ste (44:52.95)
Yeah, that's true. Okay, I like this because it offers you a way to navigate between these. Let's say you want to add something to the review, just click this and even though it's a tab, so it's not like a stepper, step one, step two, step three, yeah, it allows you that navigation. And another thing that got highlighted during the interviews was...
if we were able to autosave this and if it was autosaved, how do we actually show that? So my first question is, from a coding perspective, could we autosave it every 15 seconds or something like that? Or would that be...
adam (45:28.454)
Mm-hmm.
adam (45:41.651)
Yeah.
That would be easy to do. We could probably just like, uh, do a, a debounce on key up and like, or, and not even a debounce, just a throttle on key up and save every 15 seconds when there's been activity.
ste (46:01.054)
Okay, so that's actually doable, right? Okay, okay.
adam (46:02.954)
And that would be easy. Yeah, that would be really easy. I think one of the difficult parts might be like we create an activity in their feed about their review. And so potentially people would see their activity in their feed with an incomplete review, which if they were past the first paragraph, we only show about the first like 140 characters in the activity. But...
ste (46:30.278)
True, yeah.
adam (46:31.794)
Maybe, maybe, maybe we don't auto save until they've hit like 140 characters. And then we start auto saving that way. What's in the activity feed doesn't change.
ste (46:39.106)
Yeah, that sounds, that sounds
ste (46:44.266)
Okay, so would there be any way of auto saving it without it being published? That wouldn't be like an option, right?
adam (46:58.571)
That one would be harder because we don't have a concept of an unpublished review.
ste (47:03.498)
Okay, so basically when you're auto saving it, it actually creates that review and it just gets updated as you're writing it
adam (47:11.232)
Yeah.
ste (47:12.646)
OK, I mean, that's great. At least it's auto saved. I asked about the Save button because we had this Save and Next dilemma last time. And in one of the calls, I got suggested that we replace it with actually the Publish button on the.
uh, actual review. So that's why I asked, uh, what do you think about it? I thought it was a pretty good idea, but I don't know. What do you think?
adam (47:55.562)
Yeah, because the first time you're writing a review, you want to know like, this is, this is going out. But then if you're editing a review, then the terminology changes from published to like update, um, to use a WordPress, WordPress terminology.
ste (48:13.702)
Oh yeah.
adam (48:15.828)
So maybe it's like published the first time they write their review and then like update when they update it.
ste (48:24.758)
Yeah, I mean, that would work.
ste (48:31.046)
So this is instead of save because save, that was the problem. It actually, I was told that it actually creates the impression that it's not saved before that. So you just save it, but you're not really sure the review has gone through. So publish is a bit more final, I guess. So yeah, it kind of made more sense. That's why I think I like the idea.
So we can use the publish updates, like, yeah, option for those buttons.
adam (49:09.848)
Yeah.
ste (49:12.269)
Okay.
adam (49:12.87)
Or another option is that we don't auto save it to the database. We like, we auto save it in, um, local storage, and then we don't actually like push it to the server until they click publish that way it's like, if they refresh the page, they would still get their review. That would be another way of doing it.
ste (49:34.166)
Okay. Would that be easier or? Yeah.
adam (49:38.182)
And that, I think, I think it would be about the same, but in that case, um, publish is actually publishing it. Like it's not, it's not going out to the world until they click publish. So that way it's, there's not that accidental thing where we're actually saving it and not telling them we saved it or publishing it and not telling them we published, I guess.
ste (50:02.354)
Okay, well that sounds like a good option. I mean, if it's like the same, yeah, we could do that. I don't know.
adam (50:14.094)
Yeah. Or maybe, maybe, yeah. Or maybe like for. Of writing it initially, we could do that. And then for updating it, we save it to the database. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe just always saving it to the database is the better way to go.
ste (50:14.286)
We can get, yeah.
ste (50:29.906)
Yeah, yeah. Well, we've got at least two good options, so that's good. We can just leave it at that. I had another question. So this is my final one on reviews. Without this border, like here, or with this border? So let me just do that over here as well. So this is without it.
adam (50:34.743)
Yeah.
adam (50:51.382)
Oh wait, okay. Okay.
ste (50:52.854)
So it's more like you're editing a Google doc. And let me undo this is with the board.
adam (51:04.41)
I think I like it a lot more with the border.
ste (51:06.758)
Okay, yeah, it gives it a bit more structure, doesn't it?
adam (51:11.043)
Yeah, it makes it feel like it's a like this is the area I write in rather than kind of it feels more like a review I'm reading a review that's already been written when there's no border.
ste (51:23.714)
Hmm, true. Yeah, that's good. Okay. We'll just leave it with the border. And let's have a final call on this. Should we keep this separate step and so that I can replicate it on desktop or do it the other way around? Should we keep this separate step flow or should we have everything including tags right on this?
adam (51:57.103)
I think I like it in the separate steps.
ste (52:00.026)
separate steps. Okay, I am good with that. So let me replace this with the actual like final thing with the border.
Ta-da. So something kind of like this, right? And this would be publish.
adam (52:17.346)
Yeah.
adam (52:29.534)
Yeah? Yeah. Sounds good to me.
ste (52:31.966)
Okay. Nice. Yeah. I'm happy with this as well. And they're really nice. I think we're going to have the easiest way to, or the most pleasant way to add the review. It also includes tags. This, by the way, was a feature that was really appreciated. So if we can suggest as many tags that people associated with that book. So if other readers for this book,
adam (52:35.412)
Um.
adam (52:38.594)
Yeah.
ste (53:01.178)
that you're either reviewing or tagging associated it with horror or young adult. In the calls, this got like really praised like something that makes it easier to tag books, moods or content warnings. So yeah, I think here, I even asked if
adam (53:19.723)
Nice.
ste (53:29.218)
seeing this, would you like to see as many tags as possible or have them limited to a certain amount of tags? And the answer was definitely like as many as possible. So I kind of got from that that it's pretty wanted interaction to just like have that idea of what's
other people associated with it. So, yeah.
adam (54:02.806)
Nice. Yeah.
ste (54:03.082)
This is gonna be pretty, pretty good.
adam (54:07.346)
And then for that one, for the tags, so this is setting the genres for it. I'm wondering how we could enable people also set the moods for it, or other kinds of tags, which is a harder.
ste (54:22.766)
Good question, yeah. Yeah. Would it be possible in this actual...
ste (54:32.166)
step in the review to actually show them mingled up so you'd have genres and moods and tags like the most popular tags or would that be messy?
adam (54:49.97)
Yeah. We could. One thing we do right now in the style that we use for four tags and moods is we have the idea of like a, let me share a link with you, where like a.
adam (55:20.825)
Let me share a link in the chat here, and if you want to open it up.
ste (55:26.29)
the chat. Let me see.
ste (55:32.767)
Ah, here we go.
adam (55:34.811)
See if this works.
ste (55:38.943)
Okay.
adam (55:41.254)
Yeah. So we could have like genres and moods on that first tab or on the table view, like where genres are in like a different color than moods. So it makes it more striking the difference between what's a genre and what's a mood.
ste (56:01.718)
Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, we can keep this. Uh, if we can do that thing where we associate at least for genres, uh, different icon and yeah, for moods, just keep them like they are now.
adam (56:16.106)
Yeah, yeah, I love the custom icons.
ste (56:20.786)
Nice. Yeah, we can have a pass at that most because you know, there's not like infinite genres You can like maybe we can pick icons for the top. I know 30 40 Yeah Nice. Yeah, that'd be nice
adam (56:32.51)
Yeah. Yeah, that would, that would probably cover like 90%.
ste (56:39.092)
Yeah, exactly.
adam (56:42.598)
And it would make this a lot more fun too. Like seeing a little alien next to an alien, seeing a, yeah.
ste (56:46.903)
Yeah, yeah, that's gonna be
ste (56:51.594)
Yeah, that's going to be good. And we also are prepping up if we're ever going to do badges, I guess. For the like genre associations. Yeah, that's great. Okay. Let me move back here. Yeah.
adam (56:55.298)
See ya.
adam (57:01.771)
Yeah.
adam (57:08.266)
So we could like kind of mix them together and show like Top genres and moods all together and then and then when you search We would probably need a show like Whether something whether a search result is a genre or a mood if we had them together
ste (57:18.03)
Mm-hmm.
ste (57:32.894)
Yeah, I'm wondering if, I mean, now in search, yeah, they appear pretty different. Let me see if I have them saved over here. Nope, not over here. I think I actually deleted that one. Anyways, yeah, maybe just by differentiating the icon on this list, sorry, where they drop down, just having different icons for tags, moods.
I mean, I'm guessing most of them would be self explanatory. And I think if we have the most popular ones here, I think this is gonna become the easier way to add tags and this tags, genres and moods. And this one would be just in case you don't see like any popular tags in here. If you are reading like differently.
adam (58:25.911)
Yeah.
ste (58:31.138)
opinionated or what's it called if you have like a really
Yeah, diversity is like opinion.
adam (58:39.455)
Yeah, I think.
Yeah, I think that sounds like a good way of doing it. So that way we're, this would show, like we would show these, we would show your genres, your moods, your tags, and they would be colored potentially differently if they're a genre, a mood, or a tag. And then we would show like the popular ones for the book. And if there are none for the book already, we would show kind of the popular genres and moods.
from the app in general for people to just click. And if you searched, we would show both genres and moods in the search results while making it clear which one's a genre and which one's a mood. But we would kind of group them together.
ste (59:17.174)
shot. Yeah.
ste (59:36.778)
Yeah, maybe I should design that. Let me make a note of it. So design actual drop down at me. Can I play myself? Yeah, here we go.
adam (59:37.934)
Thanks for watching!
adam (59:46.14)
Oh yeah, that's true.
ste (59:51.494)
Можем ли да го кастомизваме това работа, за малко мисля?
adam (59:51.57)
Yeah, I think.
Yeah. Yeah, we could, we could have each row in the drop down behavior or look differently depending on if it's a genre or a mood.
ste (59:56.499)
Okay, cool. Yeah.
ste (01:00:06.855)
Nice. Can you also add the icons at the beginning or is it just text? Yeah. Nice. Okay.
adam (01:00:10.282)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we could. I think right now we're using Headless UI's select component, which is really just like a div. So you can put anything in each option.
ste (01:00:22.047)
Oh, okay.
ste (01:00:28.398)
Mmm, nice. Okay, that's really good. Cool.
adam (01:00:31.09)
Or not select. I think it's their auto it's their combo box, which is their auto complete thing.
ste (01:00:35.702)
Oh, the combo box. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking of that as well. Okay. Great. Perfect. Well, I think that pretty much covers it.
adam (01:00:48.339)
Yeah.
ste (01:00:48.73)
That says a lot to code, but once it will get out there, it's gonna be pretty nice. Oh, another one, the icon for the ebook, and this is the last one. You know, I had a chat on the Discord about what constitutes a proper ebook icon, and I don't know, should we put the EPUB? But I'm guessing that's like a really specific ebook format. We should go for a more like...
adam (01:01:02.77)
Oh, yeah.
ste (01:01:18.488)
General one.
adam (01:01:22.306)
Yeah, I was watching that conversation with interest because I'm like, what are people going to say for this?
adam (01:01:31.518)
Like the icon that comes to mind for me is like, almost like an iPad or a tablet. Like, which one? Let me zoom in on that. Yeah, yeah, like that one, I feel like that one covers both iPad and Kindle and like other devices.
ste (01:01:31.662)
So it was between these.
ste (01:01:40.096)
as in this one.
ste (01:01:57.558)
Yeah, I know. I'm okay with that one as well. So let's just keep it at that. You know, it's okay. We're the founders. Sometimes we take these hard decisions, not likely, but yeah, we have to take them. Yeah. Because there's no, I mean, I searched on Font Awesome and there is no ebook icon. So if you search for ebook, just to like give everybody.
adam (01:02:03.82)
Yeah.
ste (01:02:27.398)
claims into it. That's like a blue at the moment. Yeah. There's no ebook here. It's just books. I'm sorry.
adam (01:02:29.528)
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
If you search for Kindle, there's a couple of, it just shows like the tablet. It's basically, I think it's an alias for tablet. If you search for Kindle.
ste (01:02:43.874)
Okay. Ah, see? Yeah, this is what we're using. We'll just leave it at that. See? Decision made. Nice.
adam (01:02:53.714)
Oh yeah, they only have like four duo tones. Yeah. Yeah. That seems like the best one of them.
ste (01:02:56.948)
Yeah.
ste (01:03:02.442)
Yeah, it's pretty good. Cool. Well, that was a good one. Yeah.
adam (01:03:10.038)
Yeah, I'm excited about this book button improvements. And I feel like there's enough space that when we eventually tackle something like book ownership, we'll still be able to find a way of doing it in here, even if it means, I don't think it's gonna mean like redoing anything we're doing today. I think we'll just be able to build on top of what we already have.
ste (01:03:14.42)
Yeah.
ste (01:03:34.882)
Yeah, exactly. I think we build it in such a way that if getting editions, I mean, this update is about editions. People will be able to choose their edition that they're reading. And for most readers, that's important for me as well. I mean, some people go for that because they want to see the cover, the proper cover that they're reading. Some people want more in-depth details, like, well,
the actual content of the book or the information about the... Yeah, so it works on different levels, but you gotta track the edition. And that brings us, I guess, a step closer to offering better book data because I'm not sure what platform really has all editions all lined up at least.
adam (01:04:21.312)
Yeah.
ste (01:04:33.838)
This is like another important update. So yeah, that's exciting.
adam (01:04:39.239)
Yeah. And, and you bring up a, an interesting thing that we'll, we'll probably have to figure out in a future, which is like, what cover we show to people when they're browsing and it sounds like the cover that they've, they've read makes the most sense because that's the one that they are, you know, most interested in that they have an experience with, but what do we show if
they've read multiple versions of it like they read the audiobook and the physical book
ste (01:05:11.766)
Oh yeah. Yeah, I got another interesting one in the, in one of the interviews, because some people read and listen to an audio book at the same time. And, you know, another layer to it, because there's like infinite layers to this. Yeah, PSA to whoever's building a book.
adam (01:05:14.386)
So, hmm.
ste (01:05:41.414)
platform, you know, the rabbit hole goes like way, way, way deep as we found out. But yeah, that's cool. This is like one of the finer details and nailing it down is going to be really, really good, strong. Yeah. Nice. Well, yeah.
adam (01:05:51.039)
Yeah.
adam (01:05:55.658)
Yeah. Yeah.
adam (01:06:01.366)
Well, good call. Thanks for doing that research, too. I'm excited to have that user input in these calls. That was awesome.
ste (01:06:07.014)
Till.
ste (01:06:14.198)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really like revealing and you know, we find out so much about what you're building through this as well. Yeah.
Great. Well.
adam (01:06:26.694)
Cool. Well, thanks, day. Have a good rest of your Monday night.
ste (01:06:32.93)
Yeah, you too. Till next one. Have a good one. Bye, then. Bye, everybody. Bye.
adam (01:06:37.312)
See ya. Bye.