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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 (00:00.91)
Hey, hey, stay, how's it going?
Ste (00:03.725)
Hey Adam, it's going well. How about you? All good?
Adam (00:07.342)
Pretty good. Just work on a couple of hardcover things and recovering from a night playing a lot of Wyrmspan with some friends of mine last night. Wyrmspan, it's a new board game. It's kind of like Wingspan. If you've ever played Wingspan, it's by the same creators. It's really fun. It's kind of like this...
Ste (00:20.429)
What was that?
Ste (00:28.013)
No, I haven't played that. Wingspan, okay.
Adam (00:35.598)
engine building board game where like everyone's pretty much on their building their own thing. And the whole concept of the game is that you're enticing all these dragons to build out a cave of dragons.
Ste (00:49.069)
Okay, okay, I was gonna ask if it's like factorial but then you said dragons so it's not like factorial. Is it like factorial with dragons?
Adam (00:54.4)
No, no, it would be more like, I'm trying to think of like an engine building board game. One where like, as you're playing things, future turns, you get additional abilities.
Ste (01:09.741)
Okay, I got the engine reference now, so it's not like proper engines.
Adam (01:17.006)
Different kind of engine, yeah. But it's a fun one. My wife and I have been playing it pretty much every night lately and yeah, it's been fun.
Ste (01:18.669)
Okay, I gotcha.
Ste (01:27.245)
Okay, so it's kind of like one that keeps you like late at night.
Adam (01:32.366)
Yeah. And each game's only like half an hour after you know what you're doing. So it's pretty fast.
Ste (01:33.837)
Ah, that's good.
Ste (01:38.605)
Okay, I'll look that up. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Have you went to see Dune?
Adam (01:41.102)
What a...
Adam (01:48.174)
I have, I, we saw it last, we saw it like February 29th and then we're seeing it again tomorrow in IMAX because we found a theater that has it. And, uh, there aren't very many, like there aren't any like full IMAX theaters in Salt Lake city. Like there's a, like they have the full, I think one to 1 .43, almost like almost square IMAX version, but.
Ste (01:58.701)
Oh really? Okay.
Adam (02:18.03)
We found the best one in the city. So we're going to try that one. How about you?
Ste (02:22.573)
Okay, no, not yet. I was gonna, my wife's parents are coming a few weeks away from now, so we're gonna see if we can squeeze in, like leave the baby in their care and go see it at IMAX. At least that was my proposal. So let's see if we can actually pull it off. But yeah, I heard IMAX is like really the...
the way to see it. I've seen some screenshots on Twitter and yeah, the difference was pretty obvious.
Adam (03:00.014)
Yeah. Yeah. We, uh, we were like, we saw it at, uh, our casual theater, which is the only theater that serves alcohol. So that way you could like enjoy a beer and just, you know, relax. But, uh, like in, in, in Utah, there's this weird rule that says, like, if you serve alcohol, you can't, it has to be like 21 and up. And if it's a bar, so, uh, or it has to be like a restaurant where you have a dedicated seat.
That way you can't like carry your drink over to someone else and give it to them. They're, they're very, very strict alcohol laws.
Ste (03:31.519)
Okay, gotcha. Oh yeah. Yeah, it makes sense because it's dark, you know, so you know, it could be passing your beer onto a miner and no one would notice. That's the idea, right? That's a pity. I was trying to think if it's the same rule in London, but I'm pretty sure you can have a beer in like any cinema over here.
Adam (03:44.686)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ste (03:56.877)
There's one that has, I mean, my favorite one is one that has couches and you can order pizza and you can definitely get beers there. That one's really, really good. Yeah, it's not IMAX though. It's more for like indie movies and that kind of stuff. More for the, you know, cinephiles out there.
Adam (03:57.39)
Yeah.
Adam (04:05.902)
Those are fun.
Adam (04:16.782)
Yeah, there was a theater like that in Orlando and we used to volunteer at the Florida film festival or my wife did, and we would always go to it. And it's the Enzion theater, pretty really small theater has like a bar outside. And sometimes the actors for the movies would come and hang out at the bar before the shows. And one time Bill Murray came and he got behind the bar and started bartending and
No matter what people ask for, he would just pour them a shot of tequila.
Ste (04:48.781)
That's such a Bill Murray move. I mean both Bart and Dean Poring, everybody, I shot the particular. Jesus, wow, okay.
Adam (04:55.086)
Yep. And he would say, yes, yes, let me make that for you. And then just pour a shot of tea.
Ste (04:59.181)
I wouldn't mind. I mean, everybody should do that.
I would love that. Okay, that's nice. I'm gonna check that out. It seems like a very like, is it kind of like famous? Like it seems like the place that would be famous just because of the Bill Murray story.
Adam (05:09.518)
I'm sorry.
Adam (05:21.358)
Yeah, I think so. It's definitely the only like full out indie theater I know of in Orlando that like that. It does like, it's like a one screen theater. So it sounds kind of like what you mentioned with couches and things like that.
Ste (05:35.885)
Yeah, yeah, this one is actually a chain, but kind of like they're going for the same vibe, but they're like pretty successful because everybody wants to sit on the couch and eat pizza while they're viewing a movie apparently. So yeah, that works. Nice. Yeah.
Adam (05:54.382)
the hardcover side, what have you been up to lately?
Ste (05:56.255)
Well, we've had a lot of stuff on our plates. We had two new team members join as well, two developers, Luca and Cole. Hi. And yeah, we're doing designs for multiple features. That's what I've been busy with. We have the list updates that we talked about.
Last week we also have the dashboard that we're planning and some updates on many of the other pages. So yeah, it's a handful, I guess.
Adam (06:32.398)
It sounds like you've been kind of jumping around between things.
Ste (06:38.477)
Uh huh, yeah, well, there's lots of stuff to be jumping around. How about you?
Adam (06:48.302)
I think on Monday of this week, I deployed the, it kind of started as a feature that I thought would be relatively easy, which was like implement like banned users. So, you know, when we ban a user, we don't want to see the stuff they do anywhere on the site. And I'm like, oh, this will be pretty easy. And then I got into it and I realized like, it should also make it so that it's banned from,
even the API level access. So like when someone like uses the API, they shouldn't get anything that a band user has ever done either. And when I realized that I had to kind of restructure some of the app so that it uses like what the user's token. So previously a lot of the website would use this admin token, which has access to everything in our database. And so like behind the scenes we're calling
We're using that admin token to generate like your profile or the book page and things like that. But now we're switched to using your token for everything you see across the app. And so what you see in the app will match what you see from the API now.
Ste (08:05.773)
Okay, yeah, so, yeah.
Adam (08:06.51)
And yeah, so that allows us to like, when we ban a user, they just become gone from the entire system. Like, you know, no one can see anything they've ever done, any lists they've created, any likes on their activities, any notifications they've ever sent. It's like they, they don't exist for anyone anymore. Um, so yeah, I think that was kind of the way to go, but it took a little more work than I thought.
Ste (08:29.133)
Yeah.
Ste (08:33.741)
Yeah, it sounds like, you know, it went way deeper than just not showing stuff from the users. Yeah, we actually had our first case.
judging whether someone is a bot or not. So that came with its own set of discussions among the team. That was pretty interesting. Book discovery, since we're talking about that today, also means that you don't want your feed or your data polluted by...
you know, people don't want in your network and we're trying to, I guess, really make sure that is the way you want to be, like clean data, only the data you want to see. And that involves judging whether someone is a bot or not. And that's a pretty like sensitive decision because we're not like...
sure whether that person is a bot or not, even after we discussed about it. So, yeah, pretty interesting. We've been talking about solutions to that. I think there are some we can try, but yeah, definitely having some people you don't want on hardcover is, yeah, a new problem. And
Adam (09:43.054)
Yeah.
Ste (10:10.221)
I guess we've talked -
Ste (10:14.925)
We grew to that level.
Ste (10:19.533)
That's kind of good on, from some points of view.
Adam (10:24.462)
Yeah, it's it and it, and it plays in well with like, like we want authors and other people to be able to come to hardcover and like, be able to somehow like get the word out about what they're working on. But how do we do that in a way that, you know, isn't spammy to the existing community, which is going to be its own, its own kind of can of worms, but it'll be a fun one.
Ste (10:52.013)
Yeah, I mean, lots of... We have controls for that in place already, so I'm guessing that should be like just maybe fine -tuning those controls once we encounter the problem. I think it's gonna get like really fuzzy now that you can have bots that actually write...
good, believable content. I've seen them on other networks and, you know, even if they're using pretty cheap APIs from large language models, some of them are pretty good. So they can bypass many, many tests.
Adam (11:42.894)
Yeah. Yeah. Having, I have a feeling that kind of like, identity, uh, like automatically identifying spam systems. That'll be something that before too long, we're going to have to spend some time on, but at least it's not at the critical level. It's only at the, the caution level right now. Yeah.
Ste (11:58.541)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (12:03.181)
Yeah, exactly. It gives us some time. At least we don't have like thousands of users who are bots. Which is good. Fingers crossed. Yeah.
Adam (12:13.326)
I think, yeah, I think part of it's that we don't have like comments yet. So there's very limited ways to like spread your advertising or whatever it is you want to spread on hardcover. So yeah.
Ste (12:21.837)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (12:27.149)
Oh yeah, I know from WordPress that's like a real problem, like spam through comments is something I have never or like very hard have been able to keep in check. So yeah, good since we're planning discussions.
But for Book Discovery, which is the subject for today, what do you think we should do? So we had a last week, we had a session with the whole team and we did this exercise where we sketched a few solutions. Should we just go through what we did in the exercise and show everybody kind of like.
behind the scenes of the board or some other way to talk about it.
Adam (13:25.166)
Hmm. Yeah, we could, we could jump into that because right now when we're saying, uh, book discovery, one of the things we, we really wanted to, um, prototype was this idea of like new release notifications and, um, like, you know, coming soon books, like, how do we, like, how do we showcase those in a way and how do we, uh, like work those into the platform?
So that was kind of the start of one of the new book exploration things. And then that got us kind of on to the idea of like, which is something we've also wanted for a while is that how do we restructure our navigation and like reorganize the app's information architecture in a way that's gonna support new features where we're not just piling them onto a big pile, but like organizing in a way that.
allows people to actually use a new feature that we want to build. Does that kind of make sense?
Ste (14:24.909)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. I mean, it makes sense for every user that's been through our explore menu, which is like, you can go on the hierarchical right now and open the explore menu and you're gonna see that that menu is pretty long for like any standards, I guess. So just like separating parts of that and moving it.
in places where it's most likely to be useful. I think that's the challenge here. I think for book discovery, the main thing is to make it...
so that it works very fast. So, you know, you want a book.
Ste (15:28.813)
discovery where you see stuff while you're doing other things and you're seeing a book, you're checking that book out. Oh, okay, this could be interesting. Like when you're seeing stuff in the feed, that's passive discovery. You're just like browsing and you're looking for something else maybe, but you see something interesting that caught your eye. Okay, maybe I want to read this.
But there's also that active discovery, which I think many readers on Harcalf are doing, which is browsing through their favorite genre or trending books or something else. And yeah, I guess we got to come at it from both angles and that's the challenge. So to come at it from both angles, I think first you got to...
make sure the app is structured in a way that you can access that easily. And actually, I can go into what we've done with the menu. Maybe that's going to be better than the sketches. What do you think?
Adam (16:39.982)
Yeah, that sounds like a good starting point. I have a feeling we'll have that'll make for a lot of a lot of discussion based on those, I think.
Ste (16:48.461)
Uh -huh. Let's go over there. Let me show my screen.
And...
Adam (16:55.598)
see where.
Ste (16:59.789)
And we go back into old Figma.
Ste (17:06.253)
So here we go, we got some sketches over here from Adam. These are really good, I really like these. So these were the base for what we've done here. To get like a behind the scenes, we're doing this exercise, it's called Crazy Eights, which is basically splitting a piece of paper into eight parts and sketching some features that we've previously talked about and voted on. So...
After we do these crazy eights, we pick one and delve deeper. And this is what you're seeing here is it's one of those crazy eights, but developed a bit more. And this is how we're thinking of restructuring the navigation. So right now, you have the explore menu and...
that's going to be replaced by the Discover menu. So let me do this. So these are components. So over here, you see Trending Books. You'll see the Release Calendar, which is a new thing that we're working on. You'll see the recent and upcoming releases. I'm really excited for this one. And recommendations just for you. And over here, you have Ask Jules. So it's basically our...
AI librarian where you can go into, I guess, more detail about what you want. You can talk about anything you want with them and it gives you books. They give you books. And we've got a few more discovery tools which we're hiding because we don't want this to be a super long menu. And then for browse, yeah. Oh, let me switch that.
Adam (18:56.462)
Yeah, and for discovery here, one thing I was thinking about for these plus three discovery tools, maybe we could say something like.
Like, uh, I had this idea of like, uh, one thing I really loved in the early days of dig was they had this thing called dig labs and they were kind of like just little ideas that they've kind of thrown together where maybe they didn't want to really feature them on the site yet. And, uh, but they wanted to have them available somewhere for like power users. Yeah. Like exactly. And have like a little, like, um, what is it? Like test tube.
blab icon or something like that.
Ste (19:44.653)
Oh yeah, that's nice. Okay, let me get the, wait, let me do it in the component actually. Ah, what am I doing? So, lab experiments.
Ste (20:03.661)
You have the little icon. Is it TestTube on Phong Da Son? Let's see. TestTube.
Adam (20:10.222)
question.
Ste (20:19.629)
Is it vile? Oh, maybe it is vile.
Okay. Flask, okay. Let's try flask. Flask. Is that what they use in experiments? Okay, yeah. Here we go. All right.
Adam (20:27.598)
this flask.
Ste (20:48.461)
So we have the lab experiments. Let's put a smaller margin over here. And okay. Let's not underline this actually. Ah, I think this works that way.
Adam (21:08.494)
Yeah. And for the jewels here.
Adam (21:17.998)
Are you thinking that like Jules is considered a lab experiment because then it gets in a different color background? And it's like the first of the labs.
Ste (21:26.029)
Um...
I guess so. I just took your cue from here. So I thought this was like the section. It doesn't say, oh, no divider. It says no divider. Ah, okay. I just saw that. I just saw it.
Adam (21:32.366)
Hehehe
Adam (21:36.558)
Yeah.
Adam (21:41.998)
But maybe we could put one after Jules. That way the lab experiments is in kind of its own different color.
Ste (21:48.589)
Yeah, that's true. So let's see how it works without any color before.
Ste (22:07.309)
What do you think?
Adam (22:09.966)
I think I kind of like the little bit of color at the bottom, like just for the bottom row.
Ste (22:14.861)
Oh, just for the bottom one. Okay. So we removed this one and over here.
Adam (22:16.302)
Like, cut.
Adam (22:24.494)
Yeah, because I'm thinking like, what would happen if you click on plus three lab experiments? Would it like expand out this menu or would it go to a new page, like expand out the menu?
Ste (22:33.261)
Yeah, I guess, yeah, just expand it out. We can prototype that.
If you do this, it just, oh, wait, let me attach this instance. And you'd get this arrow flipped and you'd get buco. Buco is an experiment, right?
Adam (23:01.998)
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess that would make sense there. We have a.
Ste (23:09.005)
and...
Adam (23:14.606)
We have the series. What's it called? It's something that's not even linked on the site. I don't think. Um,
Ste (23:23.501)
Oh yeah! series explorer? or...
Adam (23:27.342)
I think it's track, yeah, trackers. Let's see.
Ste (23:32.173)
series tracker tracker and There was like the book tinder over here
Adam (23:34.766)
Yeah, serious tracker.
Adam (23:41.07)
Oh yeah, like other ideas, yeah.
Ste (23:45.741)
and
Yeah, let's just leave it so that. But this is the main idea, to just expand and they would be smaller icons. What do you think? Does this work?
Adam (24:02.51)
I think they need to like stand out a little more so they kind of look almost disabled like that. But something like that.
Ste (24:08.653)
Yeah, that's true.
Do you think we should put even more emphasis on it? So maybe...
Ste (24:21.261)
Something of the likes.
Adam (24:23.534)
Hmm.
Ste (24:26.605)
Or I guess now it stands out a bit too much, right? We don't want people to, yeah, really like go for experiments. So.
Adam (24:30.382)
Yeah.
Adam (24:34.926)
I do like that. I do like having something stand out like that. Maybe not in the menu exactly, but I like having something bright like that.
Ste (24:43.565)
Yeah, I'm a fan of accent colors as well. Let me change the accent color. So, free lab experiments or their lab experiments.
Ste (24:58.541)
that a bit too much so...
Adam (25:06.702)
Yeah, having like a non, yeah, having like a, what would it even be called? It's like an accent color that's not a, yeah, exactly.
Ste (25:19.213)
off -brand color. Basically that's it. Yeah, it really messes things up. I tried it with these icons to put the splash of color and differentiate the menus, but I mean, it's working in this context because they're small, but I wouldn't overdo it. So maybe we can...
Ste (25:48.525)
this. And I wouldn't have the lab experiments stand out too much.
Adam (25:55.502)
Yeah, because they're like fifth in importance in this list.
Ste (26:02.125)
Yeah, exactly. I think they're okay. Maybe we can put emphasis on other things. Plus you have like the three icons here and Dask tools, which is like this custom illustration. So.
Adam (26:07.854)
Yeah.
Adam (26:15.886)
Yeah, and I was thinking about these icons and I was wondering how this would look as a, like a non -duo tone icon, like as a.
Ste (26:27.693)
Oh, as a regular icon. Let me grab one from here.
Adam (26:31.79)
Yeah.
Ste (26:41.293)
So this is sharp line up.
So let's chart line up this and yeah, that's cool. I like it. I can change all of them too.
Adam (26:59.438)
Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, I think that does look good. It makes it easier to see, I think.
Ste (26:59.661)
be non -diode.
Ste (27:07.277)
Uh huh. Calendar star.
Ste (27:15.693)
and
I put this like old style wand here, but we can replace it with, I thought it would be like fantasy style wand. What's it called? Wand sparkles. Wand, ah, that's sparkles.
Adam (27:43.406)
magic sparkles. Oh yeah.
Ste (27:45.485)
Yeah.
Adam (27:49.998)
Yeah, I think those are looking good.
Ste (27:54.157)
Nice. We can do the same for these. So you'd get the browse menu, which is the way you'd browse through prompts, through... So what is this little question? I was gonna ask if you like this icon for prompts. Since they're questions, you know, I figured the question mark would work, but I don't know.
Adam (28:18.766)
Yeah, I've struggled to find a good icon for prompts, actually. I think I don't love our one that we have right now.
Ste (28:23.309)
Haha, yeah.
Ste (28:28.525)
Yeah.
Adam (28:31.15)
Let's see.
Ste (28:37.613)
Which is the one we have now? What's it called?
Adam (28:43.022)
I'm not sure. Let's see. It's probably question. Oh wait, where is it?
Ste (28:59.181)
I changed the lists one as well, to not be lists too big.
This kind of look like prompts, now that I look at it the second time.
Adam (29:11.95)
I think that's a good list one. I think that's, yeah, I want to say that's even pretty similar to the icon they use on.
Ste (29:14.989)
Yeah? Okay.
Adam (29:25.006)
on Letterboxd.
Ste (29:29.261)
Yeah, I was thinking, I mean, I put like the checklist, but then I was thinking, you know, books doesn't quite match that because it's just a checklist and you've got books. So.
Adam (29:29.582)
but not sure.
Adam (29:43.15)
What about for prompts using something with like an up vote kind of thing? Because that's kind of one of the themes of prompts.
Ste (29:53.613)
Oh yeah.
Ste (29:57.325)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, did you find a good one? I'm just like redoing everything and
Adam (29:58.254)
Um...
Adam (30:03.694)
Yeah, let me look. Like we could use like a thumb up. We don't actually use thumb up anywhere.
Ste (30:12.877)
Oh yeah.
Adam (30:14.318)
It's thumbs dash up.
Ste (30:17.261)
Okay. Ah, here we go. Yeah, that was nice. I like that.
Adam (30:26.862)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ste (30:28.269)
These are looking good. I put this like smiley thing over here. Kind of looks like, yeah. Kind of looks funny, so I just left it there. And for the old books, I put an infinity sign. I don't know, that kind of works, I guess. Okay, that's good.
Adam (30:31.63)
For the moods, yeah.
Adam (30:45.262)
Yeah, I think that works. Yeah. And for like the colors on these.
Ste (30:53.645)
Yeah.
Adam (30:54.542)
Yeah, that was like one of the things we were just talking about in the chat yesterday. It's like, should we try to theme out explore versus discover in different colors?
Adam (31:08.974)
which I, oh yeah, the purple actually looks good. I'm wondering like if we did that, I feel like that would be almost like making those our new brand colors. Cause right now I feel like our brand colors are, I think like, you know, purple, accent yellow, and then lots of shades of gray.
Ste (31:25.517)
Uh -huh. Yeah. I think that's, I mean, I wouldn't mind having multiple accent colors. I mean, if we're looking at the UI library, you can see, I mean, my favorite section, to be honest, are these labels. And look at all the colors over here. But we've had comments from some of our readers that, you know,
Some people might not like yellow, some people might not like purple, some people might have a thing against green. So I'm wondering if we're going to make this into accent colors, if we can define maybe like...
Yeah, themed accents depending on the section and not like have ourselves limited to just like two accent colors. In my view, you can play around with these four.
certain brands and I think hardcover is one of those brands which doesn't like necessarily have to identify itself through color necessarily. I mean, Leatherboxed has a bunch of accents. I think their logo, just their logo has at least three strong colors and they have the green. I mean, I guess the green is like...
the most important one, right?
Adam (33:04.686)
Yeah, and they use their orange as their error color.
Ste (33:08.685)
Oh yeah.
Adam (33:10.958)
And yeah, danger color.
Ste (33:13.805)
Yeah, I mean, contrast wise, this is not that great. And yeah, contrast wise, this is also not that great. But they work. That's my, I think, takeaway from this.
Adam (33:36.75)
Yeah, because.
Ste (33:38.157)
See, they use the blue, they use orange. Oh yeah, they actually use blue, orange and green, which is like their brand colors in the logo, which aren't, they aren't even like actually that complimentary. I mean, yeah, from a design standpoint, I mean, limiting.
Adam (33:41.838)
Oh yeah.
Ste (34:08.397)
there's, from my point of view, they could have just added like 10 more colors and it would have been the same. I mean, yeah. So I'm thinking, you know, we can just define the accent colors and maybe then if we change them throughout the site, we can decide this. And at some point further in the future, maybe, maybe even make this into a thing.
readers can choose. So if you don't like the purple, you can choose between a purple, a green, a blue or whatever. So you kind of like can do this. And obviously you don't have like this many colors, but yeah, you can change it. You can change the accent colors. You can make it whatever you like red, you put red in, you like purple, you put purple in.
Adam (34:53.102)
Yeah.
Adam (35:04.942)
Yeah, I think I kind of like that blue that you had there for a second. It was like it showed up pretty well on the dark.
Ste (35:07.981)
Hmm.
Ste (35:21.037)
Yeah, I mean this tailwind colors, from my point of view they all work.
So it's a matter of preference. So yellow works, even the red works. Red is not something, you know, usually accustomed to because it's like a danger color, but I've seen it used as an accent color very, like, with success.
Adam (35:54.734)
Yeah.
Ste (35:55.053)
We can use the blue for now, maybe.
Adam (35:58.734)
Yeah, I'm done for that for now. But if you see anything you'd like to change it to, feel free to play around with it.
Ste (36:06.957)
Yeah, I'll have a think about it because if we figure out a way to use the variables throughout the site, I think we can play around with color a lot more than we're doing now. So, yeah.
Adam (36:26.67)
Yeah. Well, one thing that I think, uh, to consider with the colors is, uh, we've been talking about for the, the book button, changing it from yellow to maybe like different colors, depending on status. Like I know, I know when I'm looking at a long list of books, like whenever I go to the trending books page, I see like want to read, want to read red, want to read, and they're all yellow. And, and so having it like a different color.
Ste (36:41.933)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (36:53.517)
Uh huh.
Adam (36:57.486)
for different statuses could make it easier to kind of just understand that.
Ste (37:00.813)
Yeah.
Ste (37:05.677)
I am totally done for something like that. Actually, I'm in the UI library right now. So for this kind of stuff, it would be pretty easy for us to change it and do something like this maybe. Or let's have a darker shade of.
Adam (37:31.502)
Probably green for red. Yep.
Ste (37:31.533)
Let's make this yeah exactly here we go
Ste (37:40.493)
I mean, it already changes, like...
Ste (37:46.093)
the whole vibe of it.
Adam (37:53.774)
Yeah, something like that.
Ste (37:54.157)
So I wouldn't mind, I mean, as long as it's... Yeah, exactly. We can experiment. Let's check the pulse. Let's maybe do it and see if anyone gets really mad or it's very annoying. And...
Adam (37:57.102)
Yeah, and that would be a really easy change.
Ste (38:16.365)
then you know it's an easy change we can revert it but or we can like make it better and push it in a direction and we can just like trigger it with the change I'd be down for that.
Ste (38:34.989)
Okay. So, uh, in terms of discovery, this would hopefully make things way clearer. So you'd have the, the discover menu where you'd see the trending, the release calendar and recommendations plus the lab experiments. And then it's you browse, which is like that kind of.
browsing that you do actively so you're really looking in places to see a book and you can either go to the prompts or check out lists, genres and moods or all books. For all books, I'm guessing we'd have something similar to what we have now.
where you can select books with a minimum of like five or 10 readers, right?
Adam (39:32.366)
Yeah, I'm thinking the list updates we've been working on, that could go to a page kind of like that, where it's kind of like, here's every book in our system, and then you can just filter and sort it down from there.
Ste (39:50.445)
Nice. Yeah, that sounds good.
Adam (39:54.67)
Or it's kind of similar to our search page right now, but a better version of that.
Ste (39:58.605)
Yeah.
nice i was gonna zoom in you remember the experimental area where we just
Covers near covers at some point. Yeah, I definitely want to do this like have all the currently reading books on hardcover and the users. But yeah, let's jump back.
Adam (40:09.614)
Oh yeah.
Adam (40:25.454)
the fun lab experience we want to try.
Ste (40:25.677)
Where was it? Yeah. Yeah. And then for your library, I was also working on, this would be like your profile dropdown. So it would go over here. Obviously like not over this one, this one would close and it have this one, but this one's still a work in progress. I was gonna. Yeah.
see what else we can put here. You gave me some good ideas, but I still have to implement them.
Adam (40:57.934)
Yeah.
Adam (41:01.646)
Let's see, what else would we want here? I'm just looking at what we have now.
Ste (41:09.357)
for books maybe even did not finish. I mean, when you go to books, this...
Ste (41:21.933)
main categories then lists would take you to
Ste (41:31.597)
And for goals, I was thinking that we could feature a main goal. So if you have like one goal to read 100 books and another one to read 10 ,000 pages, maybe you can select one as the main one and it would like show a snippet here, like a quick access. So you know, like you're 32 books in.
Adam (41:53.966)
Maybe, yeah, maybe we could leave that off the navigation here. I'm thinking like, yeah, just from a complexity level. But yeah, I'm thinking like the other things we could have here, like what else? So I'm just gonna like.
Ste (41:54.317)
Or, yeah.
Ste (42:06.509)
Yeah, I was gonna ask about it.
Ste (42:17.037)
Well, yeah, go ahead, put everything in there. We need to sign out. I think you can just copy this section and it just adds stuff. And you can remove the, yeah. Is it log out? No.
Adam (42:20.654)
brain dump over here in a little thing. Yes, I know it was one. And I was thinking we have the feed, maybe feed should be in discover as well.
Ste (42:44.461)
Yeah, that's true. You're thinking when we replace the feed with the dashboard?
Adam (42:51.438)
Well, even like the dashboard too, it's like, where would the dashboard live in this and where would the feed live in this?
Ste (42:59.565)
Yeah, good question. I mean, I thought about this a bit and I was thinking maybe the dashboard and the feed could be like this interchangeable thing you can switch between. So you'd have the, where is it? It has a dash.
How overshadowed be -
Ste (43:23.501)
Yeah, the dashboard is obviously going to be very nice and useful, but we still want people going through the feed and we have like this dashboard widgets where you can go on your feed. But yeah, I don't know. The thing we should put it in the menu. I mean, it kind of like, yeah. Okay.
Adam (43:41.678)
I think we should. Yeah, or at least I think it should be accessible from somewhere in here.
Ste (43:52.013)
Yeah, I was thinking maybe like a quick access icon or something like that.
Ste (43:59.661)
We could, I mean, basically you'd have like the home link, which kind of like acts like the link to your feed right now. But maybe we could put something like.
have this next to each other. So it's like feed them dashboard and their life.
Ste (44:33.677)
that don't fit. Sometimes things just don't work out.
Adam (44:49.646)
logo to use for the feed. The dashboard we do have.
Ste (44:53.709)
Yeah.
Adam (45:02.062)
Feed.
Ste (45:12.397)
this one.
Adam (45:36.046)
Yeah, there's like RSS as a feed, but that doesn't seem like what we're going for.
Ste (45:42.381)
Hmm, this would be, this icon would be a good feed icon, but if not that, let's see what else.
Adam (46:01.934)
Let's see.
Ste (46:11.437)
Okay, not what I wanted, but we have boxes.
Adam (46:19.15)
I have never seen that icon. Interesting.
Ste (46:21.133)
You
Sometimes they are adding the serendipity to the designs.
Adam (46:49.614)
I mean, that could work.
Ste (46:52.525)
Nah, it's a newspaper. We can, yeah, let's, we'll find one in production, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Newspaper is good enough. Should we put them next to each other? I mean, they fit somehow, so. I don't know, or should we just?
Adam (47:01.166)
Keep it there for now, yeah.
Adam (47:14.254)
I think we could put them next to each other. I'm trying to think like in a, I had a design for something where I did that. I'm trying to remember if I stuck with it. Or, oh, one thing that I tried when I was making another similar list was having like a mini link at the top.
like this one, like I had that see all link at the top, which is kind of like a hidden one, but it's like.
Ste (47:42.925)
so.
Ste (47:48.973)
Okay.
Adam (47:54.862)
But then you need like a.
Ste (47:55.277)
We could make them, yeah, if we put them like way over, you have that title, popular posts, which is pretty good because you know, you can put stuff near it. That's pretty good actually. We can make it like smaller and.
Ste (48:19.693)
Maybe I put the feet button inside of this.
Ste (48:32.909)
working with auto layout isn't like the best.
So you have the feeds and then you have the dashboards. Hmm, let's see if this works or...
Ste (49:02.029)
I'm thinking the feed and dashboard are somehow not interchangeable, but they're in the same like registry of things. So yeah, that doesn't look too bad. What do you think?
Adam (49:21.39)
Yeah, I'm good kind of penciling something like that in.
Ste (49:27.021)
We can see how it looks like in production, but yeah, that's not.
I wouldn't mind having that.
Adam (49:40.59)
Yeah, because I feel like if we did add like a fifth item here, it's just a lot to read.
Ste (49:46.253)
Yeah, exactly. And yeah, we're falling in the same pitfall, I guess, the same hole as we are in now. So...
Adam (49:50.222)
you
Adam (49:59.502)
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. We don't want to overload these menus, but how do we highlight the things we want to highlight?
Ste (50:10.253)
I think it works like that. I mean, it's easy to scan. I mean, even with both of these open, it's way easier to scan than just like one drop down that we have now. So if you're searching for a book, let's think like that. And you just want to see what's available, you can quickly browse these two menus. And I also like that now we have
the descriptions.
Ste (50:46.317)
you know what AskJules is because when you'd see AskJules in the dropdown, for example, you wouldn't know what that is. Now you know it's our AI librarian. So yeah, I think the scanning works on these ones. If I close my eyes, open them again, it's, we can scan it, I guess, a couple of seconds.
Adam (51:03.982)
Mm -hmm.
Adam (51:14.862)
Yeah, yeah, I think this is good. I think if we put anything else in here or anything else in the explore section or the browse section, having it also be.
Adam (51:32.142)
ended up having another browse one that we wanted to add, like browse by tags or browse characters, whatever it is.
Ste (51:40.525)
Yeah, but I think, yeah, that's good. But in that case, maybe we'd have like a general icon for all of them. We could make like a rule if we had more than five stuff, we got to take one out. So.
Adam (51:57.742)
Yeah. I think, I think that's a good role. Like five is, is a good limit because yeah, I'm liking this as kind of a max max look aside from the profile one, which is more like,
Ste (52:06.829)
Uh -huh, yeah. I was just looking at that one and I was thinking, oh, well, there goes that rule out of the window. Yeah, this one, I mean, this is not final. I'm thinking there are some opportunities to do other things here. I'm mainly thinking about the goals or.
Adam (52:17.582)
Yeah.
Ste (52:31.213)
You can easily go to your profile and go to the goals from there. So this, for instance, for me is a thing we can take out because you wouldn't like one edit your goals every time. And you're going to see your goals in the dashboard. Did I put them there? Let's see. Oh yeah, here we go. So you're going to see them here.
Adam (52:56.91)
Yeah, I could see them here. I'm trying to think, if we did put everything that you can get to as a top level thing on your profile, what would that look like here? Like a.
Like we have, let me just copy this one. We have like a.
Settings. Let me get rid of that bottom border.
I guess this is a top border from here.
Ste (53:42.445)
also go stuff like this.
Adam (53:46.72)
And, oh, I think I liked it below actually. Yeah. I was thinking like.
Ste (53:52.653)
Yeah? Okay. Here we go.
Ste (54:00.877)
What else is there?
Adam (54:00.91)
So the other things we have are, there's your stats. I'm just gonna, stats, there's reviews.
Ste (54:10.797)
stats.
Adam (54:18.062)
prompts, network activity. These are all the things just to bring down.
Ste (54:23.565)
Yeah.
Ste (54:59.789)
Network and activity. I mean, I think the question here is, what do you wanna like go to first when you go to a drop down that can't like suffer any.
And I guess your library is one of those things. The lists and owns may be another thing, but yeah, I'm not sure about everything else.
Adam (55:34.478)
I think we need.
Adam (55:43.118)
Yeah, those would be my least two. I was trying to put a negative sign before it, but it turned into a thing.
Ste (55:51.277)
Oh, here we go.
Adam (55:59.182)
Yeah, I was, I was a
I was thinking like if we did have anything else, what would be the things we have right now in our My Library Look drop down, which are reviews, goals, and prompts.
Adam (56:21.006)
But even these, I feel like they can be, like not having this.
divider between them even for some of these.
Ste (56:31.629)
Oh yeah, we can definitely like keep up.
Adam (56:39.47)
Yeah, so if we had.
Ste (56:42.765)
Even for this we can...
Ste (56:57.741)
I'm guessing, you know, if you want to go quickly to your stuff from there.
Yeah, and we should also put notifications in there, right? Or should we find like another place for them? Forget about those. Yeah, and it should also have like a link to your profile, I guess. I think that's like pretty important to just like see your profile or should we like, where else would you access that?
Adam (57:12.174)
Yeah, good point. Yeah, the top one should probably be.
Adam (57:33.166)
Yeah, having your profile up there makes sense to me. And this could either be, should it say your profile or should it say like, at.
Ste (57:47.405)
at the username.
Ste (57:52.653)
All right.
Adam (57:55.054)
Yeah.
Adam (58:04.238)
Yeah, maybe notifications could go first and then profile could go second, because then all of these things are kind of like, like this to here are all kind of one group of things. They're all like part of your profile. And then.
Ste (58:19.213)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, I'm even thinking if it's not worth like having this into a drop down. So at username you tap on that and it just like shows you all of these. What do you think?
Adam (58:35.566)
I wasn't even thinking about that as a drop down. I just thought this would kind of always, always, always show.
Ste (58:38.765)
Yeah.
Ste (58:42.957)
So we'd have this and we wouldn't have like this.
Ste (58:53.197)
Maybe this is a drop down and you just have these.
Uh, no. Eh, actually.
Adam (59:01.23)
It's a neat idea though. Like it, it's, it makes it a lot smaller, but I suspect most people would have to click on that for most of their, the times they click on their menu.
Ste (59:07.405)
I mean.
Ste (59:16.397)
Yeah, let's just leave it like that, I guess. I think that makes more sense. And maybe have this. Since you're going to a new page, well, you're going to a new page on all of these. So.
Adam (59:30.432)
Thanks.
Adam (59:34.222)
Yeah.
Ste (59:36.109)
Maybe remove it from everywhere.
Ste (59:41.069)
be more consistent I guess.
Adam (59:43.79)
Yeah, I think that makes sense.
Ste (59:47.469)
I kinda like that there though.
Adam (59:49.422)
We could have icons on the left.
Ste (59:51.661)
just
Ste (59:58.637)
back and make it transparent in case we need it later.
Adam (01:00:09.742)
Yeah, this is, I feel like this is just gonna be, it's kind of like a quick, yeah, it's like a quick way to access parts of your profile in your setting, in your account page. I think, yeah.
Ste (01:00:23.661)
Yeah, that's pretty good. This on mobile would become like the side drawer, right? That opens up from the side. I'm guessing.
Adam (01:00:31.342)
Hmm. Yeah.
Adam (01:00:37.006)
That makes sense to me, yeah. Because this is already pretty similar to that.
Ste (01:00:42.925)
Mm -hmm.
Adam (01:00:46.03)
Yeah, speaking of that, like...
Ste (01:00:46.925)
Yeah.
Adam (01:00:49.998)
maybe for a future one, we can figure out what other changes we would make to mobile for this, like if we want to change anything across the bottom. And, uh...
Ste (01:01:01.677)
Yes, that's gonna be interesting. That was like phase two of this. And we also got to figure out where to put like the about page, the blog and some other things, which I was thinking like, if we don't put them in the footer, where would we put them? But yeah, food for thought, I guess.
Okay, let me stop sharing this.
Good, book discovery. Figured out some stuff for navigation. I think it's gonna look pretty good. I'm excited about these navigation changes. It's gonna change stuff, yeah.
Adam (01:01:34.51)
Yeah, I.
Adam (01:01:43.502)
and
And I'm excited that we'll potentially be able to do all of this without really like, like we can roll this out without these new pages, like without the new release calendar, without the new dashboard. And then once we have those features, we'll have a place for them. And then they'll actually be able to be usable. That's one of the things I always like worry about, like when I'm working on something new, it's like, how are people going to find this and.
Ste (01:02:11.263)
you
Adam (01:02:15.662)
Like people are asking for this, but are we like giving people enough on ramps to this new feature throughout the app and through the navigation that they're going to find it. So I feel like this will set us up for that for future things we do for the next year.
Ste (01:02:34.157)
Yeah. Yeah, very true. Maybe like idea over here and then we can like wrap it up. We can like feature the dashboard and the release calendar and actually make them like with lower opacity and put the soon label next to them so people know they're coming up. And it also like gives us a bit of fuel to work on them sooner.
Adam (01:03:00.142)
true. Yeah. And we could even have like a new badge next to some of them as we launch after we launched them.
Ste (01:03:06.605)
Oh yeah, yeah, that's great. Yeah, I love that. Okay, let's do that. So next step is I'm gonna work on the actual interface for this and then pass it over to you and we should be done, I guess, particularly with this.
Adam (01:03:21.902)
Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, I am definitely curious to see like, um, once we get that in also, like how shade, what is it shade, shade DN, the library using how that works for this. Cause I think it'll, I like the idea that instead of clicking on these, they're like hover buttons because it'll like make it just easier to just browse. So I'm excited about that too.
Ste (01:03:37.933)
Oh yeah.
Ste (01:03:46.893)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (01:03:52.333)
Yeah, that's gonna be another good change. Yeah, that's great. Are you saying great stream? Don't forget to update this court event. Yes daylight saving time I almost like missed this one because it's at seven one time instead of eight how it was Yeah, I know. I hate daylight saving. I didn't know it actually went on it went on
Adam (01:03:56.75)
Cool.
Adam (01:04:05.23)
Oh yeah, you're right.
Adam (01:04:18.83)
Yeah.
Adam (01:04:26.734)
Yeah, I didn't even realize that. Thanks.
Ste (01:04:29.581)
Yeah, it's good. Perfect. Well, yeah, thanks everybody for the session and I guess.
Adam (01:04:39.47)
Yeah. See you next week.
Ste (01:04:41.741)
Perfect, have a good one.
Adam (01:04:43.63)
Bye.