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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 (00:01.526)
Hey, hey, stay, how's it going?
Ste (00:03.922)
higher, is going well, everything's good, excited to start hardcover number 11, right?
Adam (00:14.094)
I think this is number 12 now.
Ste (00:15.714)
Number 12, I always get that number wrong. Yeah.
Adam (00:19.904)
I have to like go back and look at the the overall sheet too.
Ste (00:25.558)
Yeah, how are things in Salt Lake?
Adam (00:29.198)
Pretty good. It's suddenly turned from like winter to spring and it's like 80 degrees out now. So it went from almost being too cold to too hot in like a span of two weeks.
Ste (00:42.996)
Well, yeah, doesn't sound too bad. Sounds good.
Adam (00:47.619)
Yeah, my wife got me this nice tea pot, and it has this base with a tea light in it to keep it hot. So it's been really nice. I think it's from Norway or somewhere in Scandinavia, but it keeps my tea hot for like six hours.
Ste (01:00.343)
Oh wow.
Ste (01:10.846)
Okay, that's a sleek looking teapot. That's pretty nice. That's a nice present.
Adam (01:13.505)
Yeah.
Adam (01:16.908)
It's been very well received and I'm much more hydrated than I have ever been before.
Ste (01:19.378)
Yeah.
Ste (01:22.962)
Well, that's good. That's always good. That's always a plus. Are you generally like a fan of tea more than coffee or just tea?
Adam (01:31.994)
I pretty much always start like every day with coffee. Like if I don't start the day with coffee, then something's probably wrong. But like back when I worked in an office, I would normally like take breaks throughout the day and like get more coffee and really like have an afternoon coffee and a morning coffee. So this switch to like tea in the afternoon has been, I think it's a welcomed relief for like.
Ste (01:38.24)
See you.
Adam (01:59.41)
my energy levels at the end of the day where I'm not like loaded up on caffeine at like 10 at night or something. Yeah.
Ste (02:04.654)
Yeah, yeah, that afternoon tea really hits like in the right places. I've been doing it as well. I mean, I live in tea nation. So yeah, basically lots of teas. I think I have at least two a day, but sometimes I have up to four. So. Yeah.
Adam (02:23.67)
What do you have a go to tea?
Ste (02:27.19)
I've been trying out stuff. There's lots of like indie brands. You see them popping up in the supermarkets and at the Organic markets and whatnot and yeah, I've been trying things out Usually like for energies green tea and I also do matcha now and then I bought one of those whisks And I whisk it up Yeah, that's good as well Well, not tea or is it tea? I know what much is. No, I think it's an algae
Adam (02:48.586)
Oh yeah, nice.
Adam (02:56.994)
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I associate matcha and green tea so heavily that I don't know the difference.
Ste (02:57.03)
Where is it? I have no clue. Anyways.
Ste (03:07.459)
Yeah, same.
Adam (03:10.387)
My go-to is a roasted green tea. So it's like very, very light. It has audit, it has some of the flavor of green tea, but without as much caffeine.
Ste (03:21.014)
Okay, that's a pretty tough one. I haven't been able to get into like roasted. Is it like the Japanese Sencha or that kind of stuff? Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty tough tea, but that's good. That's like it. I mean, I can drink it, but it's not my favorite.
Adam (03:28.108)
Yeah.
Adam (03:32.014)
I'm sorry.
Adam (03:40.006)
I think I like that it's very like subtle. It's almost like drinking like hot water with like a hint of flavor. Ha ha ha. Ha ha.
Ste (03:47.134)
Uh-huh, yeah, it is really subtle, but really tough from a taste perspective. Yeah. Uh-huh, yeah. Uh-huh, yeah, rougher on the edges. Cool, great. This has been good, good to talk.
Adam (03:54.602)
Yeah, it has like those tannins a bit like a lion or something. It's a little bit rough. Yeah.
Adam (04:08.682)
I mean, it's like reading and tea, I feel like they could go hand in hand. Like we...
Ste (04:12.162)
Yeah, I think it's maybe the most associated thing with reading, right? Like have your cup of tea and reading. It's like comfy reading. I'd associate those. Great. Should we start with some
Adam (04:23.915)
Yeah.
Adam (04:38.282)
Yeah, sounds good. What have you been up to hard-giver wise lately?
Ste (04:43.342)
Well, I've been working on lots of updates on the design side, which obviously aren't translated yet to the app. So many people might have seen the app be the same for quite a while now. I think we've been doing lots of updates which are coming up, like the book page, the way books are rendered and the search, which we'll revamp. And yeah, it's what we're going to talk about.
today. And apart from that, I've been working on the sharing images for hardcover. And we can also offer a few glimpses of what we have been doing in that area. And I think that's pretty much it. Lots of updates on the design side and the book data side, which we've been handling.
Adam (05:36.482)
Nice. Yeah. The, every time I start working on book data, I always think this is going to be a quick project and then it's always like 10 times longer. It's like, okay, I guess I need to like change 10 different tables in our database and then update how we pull data from five different providers. And then it'll work. But, uh, I feel like every time we.
I like get in there and make those major changes. It gets like incrementally better. And hopefully by after this phase, um, we're going to be at a good place where people are able to edit books, edit additions, and, uh, we'll be set up for. Even some additional data that we want to have in the future that we don't have yet, like, uh, things like awards for a book, um, or like locations that that book takes place.
characters in the book. It'll set us up for being able to expand the data that we show and make that editable by readers. So I'm excited about that.
Ste (06:45.275)
Yeah, that's going to be really good. So the goal here would be to ultimately have the, let's say, most comprehensive book data of any platform, which is a big goal, but I'm guessing on Goodreads for many books, that's not the thing that happens, even though there's a lot of librarians, there's a lot of...
people editing at structure is a bit different than ours too, I guess. I'm hoping with what we're doing now with additions and the editing flow, it would be really easy to get to that point where we have the most comprehensive comprehensive book data. And it's way better than, you know, all the other sources.
Adam (07:36.97)
Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be tricky between going wide and deep. Goodreads goes very wide. They have more books in the database than we do by far. I think we're leaning towards going very deep with the books we have, but still going wide enough to cover the books that people are reading. And then hopefully that will just expand as
Ste (08:01.049)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (08:05.102)
more books are added to our database. So we don't need to have every book fact about every book that Goodreads does. We just need to have decent facts about the books that people are engaging with on hardcover.
Ste (08:17.242)
Yeah, plus with that editing flow, anyone who's reading a book can update details about that book, which is gonna be great. And the editing flow is really coming on nicely. The demo you did on our last call was really nice to see, especially for something that's so complex. So that was...
Adam (08:31.214)
Thanks for watching!
Ste (08:41.71)
I can't wait to like actually be able to do that for some of the books in my library, update the covers, update the data.
Adam (08:51.422)
Yeah, I'm like cautiously excited. Like there are still like things I'm worried about around it. Like there's always gonna be bad actors that come in and want to mess things up. So I feel like until we get through some of those bad actors and we realize like the full process of how we roll back their data, which there's ability to do it in the app, but that still requires.
manual interaction. It's not like an automated thing where we're finding people preemptively and undoing their work. So I think like after we spot some bad actors, then we can build an algorithm around finding those preemptively and kicking them out ahead of time. But that'll be like an auto-moderator kind of feature for a future date.
Ste (09:36.472)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (09:42.298)
Yeah, well that sounds good and I'm way more interested in the good actors, which hopefully will be like a lot.
Adam (09:50.782)
Yeah.
Ste (09:53.662)
Great.
Adam (09:54.154)
Yeah, it's been taking up pretty much all my time, but I'm hopefully gonna be done with that this week. And then I'm gonna switch over to some SEO stuff and then jump on the book page, which I'm very excited about.
Ste (10:06.99)
Yeah, that's when the updates which our readers will really see will come into play. And for the search, which is our subject today, we've done some first designs for how we were thinking of approaching search. And now would be a good time to maybe go over those and
start doing a work session like we do on this calls live working session where we come up with ideas and go through the process and how we do things usually when we work on a new feature.
Adam (10:50.238)
Yeah. Do you want to share your screen for this one? I have a feeling whenever I share my screen and I'm trying to make edits, it always looks like a, I don't know, a dolphin on land or something. So.
Ste (10:54.489)
Yep.
Ste (11:05.846)
That's a good one. Okay so here we go.
Can you see my screen? OK. So this is the new search as it is now. Let me disable the grid. It's way more complex than what we have now. And what would happen is that when you click on the search box up top, you would still get the drop down where you would see the fast results. But if you would actually click.
Adam (11:15.69)
Yep. Looks good.
Ste (11:43.85)
enter or tap enter or on mobile actually click the book navigation, which is somewhere on the bottom on another screen, the search navigation, you would get to this page where you would have tabs for the books, the authors that were found in the search, the readers, Ask Jules, I'm going to talk about this.
the later and the series. So basically all the results that are related to the book. And it would be way fancier from a graphic point of view than what we have now and way easier to find what you're looking for. And it would go across books, authors, readers, and we will also, we're also thinking of including
our AI book finding assistant over here. So you would have this as a search item that you can easily access through the search. And you would also be able to find other readers, which is really important and not really ideal right now. Hopefully we'd be able to order them by similarity as well.
and you'd be able to find authors and tags for anything you search for. So this is the starting point. From the starting point, we have a few ways to go about it.
What were you thinking Adam, related to the search? You mentioned that you looked into a searching platform that would make it easier for us to get those results, right?
Adam (13:27.876)
Yeah.
Adam (13:39.078)
Yeah, like one of the issues we have right now is that the way we're searching is we're just doing a Postgres query to the title column of the books table. So we're limited to searching whatever is in the title of the book, which means like if you search, you can't type an author name, you can't type, you can't type a series name, it's just the title. So...
One of the things we were looking at originally was Elasticsearch, which is like another, like I think it's Lucene-based, solar-based index that runs on another place that kind of caches all of your data that you want, and then you can search across it. But the more I've looked into Algolia, the more interested I am in potentially using that. And one thing I really like about it is that it's directly accessible.
from the client side.
Adam (14:44.094)
So as soon as you start typing, it's not even hitting our server, it's hitting Algolia's server directly to get these results and show them. And behind the scenes, we're uploading all of our data to Algolia and then it's able to search that.
Ste (15:02.138)
Yeah, that sounds really exciting. I mean, I think I've seen Algolia mentioned by most startups I've looked into and it's solid, I think the way it searches for results, I think it also has an AI powered search, if I'm remembering right, but as you can see, yeah, it gives you like really good results. Are you thinking like in terms of design that
it could function differently. I've seen all of these solutions for search that are a bit different than what we're doing here. I was looking at one from Stripe where you'd actually be able to hit command F or a certain combo of keys on your keyboard and...
it would bring up search as an overlay. And I think that would be like one of the alternatives that could work to what we have now. What do you think about that?
Adam (16:12.594)
Yeah. I've been trying to like figure that out in my head too. Cause yeah, we have like the search bar at the top. You start typing and it drops down. That's kind of the auto complete way that seems like the most, the most like original way of doing search. Like that's, I think that's what Goodreads even has. And it's very familiar to people. Kind of the next part, the next iteration is like, you know, you hit a search button and it takes you to the search page. That's.
that's even older back. And then thirdly, you have kind of what you just showed where it's like just a search box that pops up on the current page. And then you have the next iteration, which is like search box pops up and it takes over the entire page. So it's not even, so it looks like you've navigated to a new page altogether. And.
Ste (17:04.968)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (17:07.334)
And I think I'm leaning away from the auto complete on the header to either something more like this with Stripe or more like Indie hackers where it takes over the entire page.
Ste (17:20.682)
Okay, that sounds good. I'd also lean in that direction.
Ste (17:28.482)
I think it's a pretty good solution, kind of like this. I think this is like really similar to what IndieHackers has actually. Let's go to the website.
Adam (17:33.624)
Yeah.
Ste (17:42.146)
I think it's pretty organized. So over here you tap search and it goes to this thing, which kind of looks like an overlay, but as you can see the page changed and over here you can search for a word and searches for everything on that network. And you can also filter all the results by...
tapping the tabs over here. So this would be similar to what we're doing with books, authors, and all results, which would be default. And you can also do this, which I find pretty interesting. And it would really be good for the time when we implement discussions. So for a book, it wouldn't be relevant. You could have some sorting.
Adam (18:22.166)
Yeah.
Ste (18:38.042)
mechanism over here by release date or by something, not to complicate it. I mean, we could think about what would be like the most popular thing you would do on this page. But for discussions, yeah, it would really be interesting to have these as well. And this like really easy navigation because it's going to get complex, I'm guessing. So.
Adam (19:03.112)
Yeah. And on that all results page for indie hackers, I'm assuming that was showing like discussions and users like the all tab at the top.
Ste (19:16.534)
Yeah, let me actually search for...
Ste (19:21.662)
what I search for. Let's say, do you have any ideas? I was...
Adam (19:27.49)
Like, I mean, word's good, but if you go to like the All tab next to discussions, like is that showing? So it's, okay, so it's like sections for each thing. I see, yeah. It's like one part of me doesn't like that because like if you were searching for, you know, token, token would show up way down once you get to the author section. But I think...
Ste (19:32.986)
Yeah. Ah, here we go.
Ste (19:39.559)
Yeah.
Ste (19:53.501)
Yeah.
Adam (19:56.05)
I think Algolia actually, that's something I need to research. When you search Algolia and you search something like this with all, is it being able to separate out different types of entities in your data model? Yeah, that'll be something for me to check out.
Ste (20:14.406)
Yeah, it does that. Tweeter is also a good example for search. Let's see, term. And you see a combination of people and then tweets. So I know how it actually does this, but I think it's maybe predicting what you're most likely to search for.
And you can search for latest people and it just shows people, but it shows people at the top. For us, I'm guessing that category would be books. So in most cases, you'd be searching for a book and then I guess for an author and then for another reader and then it would be like a part of a discussion or a prompt or something else or review.
Adam (21:11.366)
Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, I was like trying to figure out like if we need something that shows multiple types on one page or whether we just have like books as the one first one. And I'd lean towards books as the front one first one and then if they want to search for anything else maybe they click on the tab for it and it's an extra click to get to a specific author.
But I guess if they did search for Brennan Sanderson, they could still see the books by Brennan Sanderson, and then they could click on, buy Brennan Sanderson, and that would take them to his page anyways. So it's kind of an author search and a book search.
Ste (21:57.786)
Yeah, that's true. Oh yeah, good point. So that would actually happen. So that would be good. I'm wondering if we can show mixed results here. So let's say you have the Alt tab, and you show some books, you show some readers, and you show some authors in there as well. It could be something like.
this. So let's do some live design. Let's see how we can structure this. So it can either be by category. So you get authors, which would be the result that matches the most than books, than readers.
Ste (22:48.338)
And for authors, let me actually grab something from the views for people I've been working on. There's lots of alternatives here. I'm going to grab this one because I think I like it the most, but we'll have a talk about those. So you get authors, then you get books, and then you get readers. So let's say we do something like this. So you have.
two authors and this is really rough by the way, but I'm just putting it there so we can see if it's a good alternative.
We would maybe have books, but not in the...
expanded view but in the cover only view. Let's see, this is probably not a good idea but anyways.
Adam (23:44.574)
I feel like this is helping me realize how much I don't like it, which is good. I mean, it helps us learn what a preference is for us even. Because it sounded like it could be a good idea, but seeing it now, compared to like just looking at the Brennan Sanderson books, this hits so much harder on intent, I feel.
Ste (23:56.391)
Yeah.
Ste (24:12.666)
Yeah. And I think it's closer to, I like it better as well. But I also think it also hits closer to what our readers search for. So for networks like IndieHackers, it might make way more sense because they mainly have discussions here. And discussions are hard to browse.
So you would need something like this to browse all of the things, including groups and users for this kind of search for a goal. It's the same case. You have lots and lots of resources. When you're a user and you're looking for a resource, it's useful to have this, let's say, wider and more diverse search. But in our case, I think
of the cases would be people searching for books, you would be able to find the author in the book section as well. And if you would go to authors, you'd actually find Brandon Sanderson, which would replace N.K. Jemisin over here. And for readers, yeah, it'd have a separate tab. I think it's way better to do it like that than, yeah, show all of them. Because if you're
Ste (25:37.446)
that, let's say, you want to search for someone on hardcover and let's say you write Brandon Anderson and you want to see if he's a user on hardcover, you would go to the Reader's tab. So it's only one tab away. Even for mobile, it's like a half a second interaction to get to that. And the advantage is that you have way cleaner results on the book page, which is the most important one, I guess. Would that check out?
Adam (26:06.75)
Yeah, I think that checks out.
One, yeah, having all, I feel like it would just be a cluttering thing. And it's also, for us compared to something like IndieHackers, we have hubs of data that are jumping off points to lots of other places. And a book is a jumping off point to authors, to readers, to prompts, to lists. And so...
that would be your entrance point. And then from there, you would probably go to somewhere else. While on any hackers where it's more discussion-based, you would really just go into a discussion, come back out, maybe go to a list of discussions and go back in. It's a very different flow for the user journey.
Ste (26:59.898)
Yeah, totally agree.
Adam (27:05.735)
One of the things that I guess is still to be determined is if we do like a full overlay like IndieHackers or like the stripe, it was like the colored overlay with a partial background. What are your thoughts on those approaches?
Ste (27:26.488)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ste (27:31.182)
Well, for desktop, I think it would be slick. For mobile, I'm having a hard time thinking how that would actually work because I don't think an overlay works particularly well on mobile. So it would, even if we treat it as an overlay, look like this. I can, actually, let's go to the Stripe API and see, stripe.com, here we go.
see how they do it on mobile. So let's inspect this. Okay.
Ste (28:10.166)
Okay, so they do an overlay on mobile as well. This is kind of confusing. I don't know if I really like this. So let's search for a word. You get this. It goes up, it goes down. We'll have covers as well. They're info heavy, so maybe for them it's okay, but we're also visually happy. I mean, the book has got to have a cover. You got to have...
Adam (28:12.878)
interesting. Yeah.
Ste (28:35.946)
maybe that's a picture of the author as well would be neat. So it should take up this whole screen. And if it takes up the whole screen on mobile, the question is, wouldn't it be a more cohesive experience if it does the same on desktop? And pros and cons would be that you're going, the con would be that you're going to a new page. So you're...
on the homepage, you tap on the search, you go here. This happens really fast. So, you'd be on this page with the cursor focused here and you'd be able to start typing. The con would be that you're gonna change pages, but there's also a big pro because the information on here is very, very complex. If this would have been an overlay over
more complex info in the background, maybe the feed or something that's like really info heavy that maybe even updates, it would be way too much going on, I think. In our particular case. What do you think?
Adam (29:47.83)
Yeah. As you were saying that, I was almost thinking about search as almost like two paths. One where it's just where I wanna navigate to a page as quick as possible. And when you wanna navigate to a page as quick as possible, an overlay seems better. But if you want to like learn about the thing you're searching, then a separate page seems faster. And I...
Ste (30:14.503)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (30:18.262)
I feel like more people want to learn about the thing they're searching than to just jump to it, but it, it also makes me wonder about like almost doing both of them and having like a quick search, which just like, is like that pop down, like a, uh, a quick way to navigate to another page on the site. But I feel like this one would be the more useful overall.
Ste (30:25.776)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (30:45.522)
Yeah. And thinking about that, if you do a quick search, so let's say you're searching for a book, if you get instant results and want to learn more about that book, so you would have to go to the book itself, so you would change the page. I think this view would offer you a better overview and maybe even a quicker overview of the info that's important, because
If we do a quick search on mobile, we definitely, I mean, it could look like this, but I don't know if we'd be able to include the tabs as well. That's...
Adam (31:27.079)
Yeah, I don't think the quick search would work on mobile at all. I think it would only be like a desktop thing too, because yeah, there's a lot to show on mobile. And even if it was a quick search, this is pretty much what a quick search would show.
Ste (31:43.918)
Yeah, exactly. It would be just this. So the quick search would actually be the search. I'm thinking about the use cases. So the use case I'm imagining is someone is trying to add a book they've already read to their list or they want to mark something as wants to read quickly. So I sometimes do that. I found, I find the book on Twitter or.
Wherever I go on hardcover, I search for it. I add it to my want to read list. So when I do that, when I want to search for it, it should be fast. So I should do that by tapping search, searching for a book. I get, I click the want to read button and it's in my library. Would that, would there be another case where a quick search would be as useful as that?
Ste (32:44.646)
I'm just trying to imagine what else, where else could the quick search be useful for what you're trying to do instead of this search, going to the search page and
Adam (32:55.339)
Yeah.
Adam (33:02.418)
Yeah, I think it would only be useful on desktop when you already know you want to go to a specific page and you almost wanna skip going to the search results intermediate page. You wanna really just navigate from wherever you are to a book page and you wanna skip like going to a separate search page and clicking on something. You just wanna type like
Command K, A-J for Harry Potter, hit down and enter and go to the Harry Potter page.
Ste (33:38.494)
Mm-hmm. What would happen if you would have that quick search and you'd want to go to the normal search?
Adam (33:49.243)
Mm.
Ste (33:50.93)
That's one of my concerns that I think it's actually if you search for something and you get results and you click on one result, it could go to the result. But if you tap Enter, it could go to the search page.
Adam (34:15.41)
Yeah. Yeah. The only thing that came to mind was almost like
having an expand button, same way you have an expanded window in your operating system. And the expanded version is what shows up by default, but if you like.
shrink it, it shrinks to like an overlay. But I'm probably like way over confusing this. I have a feeling that the quick search is like a sprinkles on top added bonus later, if it comes in handy, while the this search is like the meat and potatoes of search.
Ste (34:58.554)
Yeah, definitely, but I kind of like that. I am just gonna do this. And if we don't like it, we can just ditch it. But this is...
Adam (35:08.914)
I would personally use it from time to time for sure.
Ste (35:13.418)
Yeah, it would be, I mean, implementation wise, I'm guessing it won't be like that's hard to achieve. So let's say you have something like this and.
Ste (35:28.826)
this you tap outside you close it and here you have a send icon let's put it here because this is an auto layout and I'm thinking when you tap search or command K let's say we ditch the or we make this into a button this would be the button
The overlay appears when you're on desktop, only when you're on desktop. And you can actually...
Ste (36:07.138)
on this as well. Sorry, I'm also thinking about design details as I'm going along. If you would write something here, it would populate this with results. Maybe you would not have these, not have this. And if you would either click enter, so you're done typing, you see the results. These are the quick results.
Maybe you want to go to the full search. So at this moment, you either tap this or tap enter, and it goes to the, like this page.
Adam (36:50.175)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, something like that could work. And then.
So.
Ste (37:01.33)
So this would be a button. It wouldn't actually be in the header, which poses some problems. I mean, if you, it would be an overlay, it would be way more usable right now when you're on hardcover. And if you're searching for a book, it's kind of like, let's see the fault.
Ste (37:27.078)
This is sideways, it's on the top. You see the results here. It would be way better if it would be, all of this would be central. And if you could navigate it sort of like this. So you'd have this, you'd have this, and then you'd have all of this word. And you could navigate it like this. You would have shortcuts for it as well. And, oh, okay.
actually do this for any book.
Adam (38:01.559)
Yeah, that could be a really fast way of navigating around hardcover for sure. And.
Ste (38:06.486)
Mm-hmm. Another question for this one. Would you have quick links to pages here? So would you have your want to read, would you have your less accessible links here? So if I would step over here in the quick search. One, two, would I get?
Adam (38:23.365)
Hmm.
Ste (38:33.274)
my link to my want to read after I get all the books that start with want to.
Adam (38:33.614)
Hmm.
Adam (38:41.078)
That's a good question. My immediate thought was no, but I could see why that would be useful. I guess it's the difference between if this is a search or if this is like a command palette. And if it's a command palette, then you would expect, or at least I would expect things beyond just search in there like this.
Ste (38:58.69)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (39:12.218)
It could be both, I guess. So, I mean, search is kind of like a command palette where you wanna go and do stuff with books or follow people. I'm guessing if we find links that match this, we could show them here in the quick search, but not in the big search.
Adam (39:37.491)
Yeah, it's.
Ste (39:39.098)
And this can definitely be, I think maybe phase two. So we have it, but you know, we focus on delivering this first, knowing that we can deliver this without impacting the usability. So it would match, the navigation would match. You would have a way to go from this to this and back if you wanted to.
Adam (40:03.05)
Yeah. One of the things that came to mind for this screen.
was almost like the ability to.
have a button like up here or something, which like maximize this window. And maximizing this window is what turns it into the full search results page. So it could effectively be the exact same page that we show, just styled differently, like with the parameter passed in.
Ste (40:38.438)
Yeah, it could be the same component exactly, but we'd put it in a, let's see, does this work? Nope. Let's go to Font Awesome and search for a maximize icon.
Ste (40:58.922)
Oh crap. Did I spell it? Oh, I spelled it with an S. God damn. Okay.
Adam (41:07.482)
As soon as you typed it in font awesome, I'm like, uh, yes. UK UK spelling.
Ste (41:11.534)
Here we go. Yeah, British English ruined me. Everything is with an S. I'm guessing, I mean, in my mind, the maximise wouldn't be the primary thing I think about when I would be on this...
search bar and I would tap enter or this button, I would expect to go to that page, but we can have it as a button there, definitely. I'd also leave this on because this is basically enter with your mouse. So instead of pressing enter on your keyboard, you would actually be able to click this and you would go to the full results page.
Adam (42:06.002)
I'm actually not sure about enter there because if we're doing this as an auto complete or an auto, what is it, like a key down search, one thing that I've noticed is that people will start typing and they'll hit enter just to see the results, not to go to the new page because they're so used to hitting enter at the end of, like when they're done searching.
Ste (42:16.615)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (42:31.658)
So they might have wanted to see it in this modal, but they hit enter because they want to see results. But then it takes them away before they can even see them here.
Ste (42:41.518)
Okay, yeah, I get what you're saying. Yeah, that's that's true. We could just leave this icon if they want to go to that page the maximize button I would be unsure of Because I wouldn't know what it does. I mean I'd rather have it written out like see all Results maybe or something similar Rather than have it only as a as an icon
Adam (42:56.398)
Okay.
Ste (43:10.942)
or I don't know, maybe it's...
Adam (43:22.631)
Yeah, I'm not sure about the maximize icon either. It seems like it's not conveying what's going on, which is kind of toggling between showing these search results as the modal and the separate page.
Ste (43:40.923)
Mm-hmm, or we could do wild idea what we're doing now
Ste (43:51.582)
What did I just do? Okay. So I actually searched for something instead of doing this. Um... We could have it as an icon.
Adam (44:06.955)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (44:07.954)
over here.
Ste (44:12.486)
this would be like the full and you know, maybe it's gonna be smaller than this. And you'd also be able to see this. Maybe have it all the way up too much, maybe.
Adam (44:30.216)
I think I liked it on the right where you had it originally.
Ste (44:33.793)
Yeah.
Ste (44:37.918)
Okay, and the links can be here, I guess, or further down. Let's say we have a link and the books can be way...
Ste (44:52.242)
here, could be here.
Ste (44:58.386)
Now let's just leave it there. And if there's a link, it knows where we ditch this.
Adam (45:08.114)
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm imagining like you hit command K, you type like a couple letters of a book or an author, and then you hit like down and enter and it takes you to that page.
Ste (45:24.034)
Mm-hmm. Come on, okay.
Okay. And it should be one for windows, right?
Adam (45:34.877)
Oh, right, yeah.
Ste (45:38.075)
shortly.
Adam (45:43.082)
I know one of the ways I've seen that on some places is like on a, if you go to like the tailwind.
site. They have an example of how they do that on their homepage.
Ste (46:03.95)
Okay, so let me try this out. Command K, is it contextual? Maybe it's...
Ste (46:13.134)
If I'm on Windows, does it say control K?
Adam (46:16.147)
Yeah, it does.
Ste (46:18.358)
Okay, is this an Algolia thing or is it like their thing? I'm guessing you can
Adam (46:24.837)
I think it's the CSS.
Like a.
Adam (46:31.602)
Maybe it's just injecting the image with JavaScript, checking the browser.
Ste (46:37.434)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Let's just leave it as command K and, yeah, change it to control K. It's good that we're not showing it on mobile because, yeah, no shortcuts on mobile.
Adam (46:55.103)
Yeah.
Ste (46:58.734)
Yeah, this is a really nice little snippet and it covers the case which we mentioned. Like you want to search for something, you just hit command K and you have all of these in here and let's do that thing where you have the esc key.
Ste (47:21.015)
exit.
Let's see if this works. So you have a ghost button. It shouldn't say ghost. So you know the key to cancel this is the S.
Adam (47:36.796)
Oh, right, yeah. Good point.
Ste (47:41.446)
This is looking mighty fine.
Adam (47:43.87)
And then this, like, command K part, this could potentially show up on the, like, up here in the search at the top.
Ste (48:00.682)
Oh, yeah. Let's see. Like this.
quick search. So let me bring the overlay down a bit. Of course.
Adam (48:14.186)
That's why I couldn't click on it. There was an overlay in front of it.
Ste (48:22.266)
SM has an icon and this is command. This works so well.
Adam (48:31.597)
Ho ho.
Ste (48:33.146)
Well, not so well, but...
Ste (48:39.806)
Well, it shouldn't be the duotone one, but anyways, let's just look at that and it could say, quick search.
Ste (48:56.454)
Okay, and this, ah, we can just leave it there. Okay. And have the overlay over it.
Ste (49:10.074)
Let's leave it like that. The overlay will be the over the full thing on.
Ste (49:19.302)
the life. Yeah.
Adam (49:23.554)
Let's see.
Ste (49:25.942)
Oh, I deleted the ask.
Ste (49:33.639)
Yep.
Adam (49:35.638)
It's about the limiter.
Ste (49:38.332)
Ah, here we go. Yeah, that's perfect. Wait, you have to put it with, ah, no space between, but yeah. This is basically Figma's version of the Flexbox.
Adam (49:53.78)
Oh yeah.
Ste (49:56.03)
Okay, now it's automatic.
Adam (50:00.814)
So in this quick search, I guess the question is if we wanna do a search across different types of entities like books, prompts, authors, or if it should just be books or if we should do tabs on this page as well or on this modal. So, let's see.
Ste (50:21.722)
Well, if it's desktop, we have a bit of space. So I think we could put the tabs in there as well. Why not? I don't know. What's your feeling?
Adam (50:31.207)
I think putting the tabs in there works. I feel like it...
Adam (50:39.198)
Yeah, it like, I feel like asking people to go to a whole other page to search feels, it feels kind of like an extra step, an extra commitment to like leave whatever page I'm currently on while doing it like this. Yeah, it feels like we're not asking as much from readers for them to find whatever they want.
Ste (51:01.464)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (51:06.642)
Yeah, maybe like even leave fast controls in there.
Adam (51:10.482)
Yeah. And I think, I think one of the nice parts with Al Golia is we would be able to get these numbers to show the number of books, authors and readers. From what I, from what I've seen in some of the examples where they have like you search, and then it's showing like these are the genres that the matching books have and the count of each of those genres. I think we can use something in that
Adam (51:40.342)
But that's assuming that Algolia lets you search multiple entity types and not just one entity type. So that'll be something for me to research. But worst case, we just don't show the count at the top except for the currently active tab.
Ste (51:49.786)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (51:59.006)
Okay, gotcha. Okay. Yeah, that's not too bad at all. So it should be Pretty pretty good. I'm really liking this quicknav now that we've actually made it and it's gonna be really good for desktop browsing so Yeah, it's a really good addition and it complements this really well I Should remove these by the way, so let me just make
Adam (52:08.578)
Hehehe
Adam (52:16.246)
Yeah.
Adam (52:23.402)
Yeah.
Ste (52:29.219)
Take this.
Ste (52:33.786)
See, this is how the design is done on tire cover.
Ste (52:39.266)
Okay, so we have the quick command palette as well. That's pretty nice.
Adam (52:48.485)
Yeah, I like it. I feel like it's a good intermediate ground between a dropdown and the header and going to an entirely separate page.
Ste (53:00.094)
Mm-hmm. I think it's way better than, I mean, I like drop downs. Don't get me wrong, but always you want the information that interests you to be displayed as central as you can. On mobile, that's definitely like easy, but right now the way we have it over here in the upper left
Ste (53:31.314)
defocusing, I guess. And from a design perspective, you know, if we had this with an overlay on the center, exactly like this, it lets you focus way better on what you're trying to search, which is the goal here. So you wanna find something fast, you wanna go back where you were as fast as you got here. And this does all of those things better than.
It's going to be the best search if we do this in the command palette as well.
or yeah.
Adam (54:09.039)
Yeah, I'm really liking this. Is there anything standing out to you from this that you would change or that seems like an area of improvement?
Ste (54:22.458)
Well, I'm sure we can optimize things. Of course, I'm guessing in the layout. For this one, I'm thinking it's pretty good in terms of what we're showing, especially for this stage. So this would be a book display component that's on the big search. It would have the.
book bio as well, the book bio, the description, sorry, bio for authors. And in this version, it would just have the average rating, the number of readers, the number of people who are currently reading this author, want to read button and match percentage. I'm guessing it covers all the important bits.
Adam (55:09.826)
Oh, one more thing. I was actually, this is kind of funny. I was talking with my wife about search because I was showing her our search prototypes and I was like just kind of doing a user interview with her about it. And one of the things that she mentioned that she wanted, and I actually noticed this is on Goodreads as well, is the series position for the top series. And...
Ste (55:24.087)
Uh huh.
Adam (55:38.198)
potentially how many books are in that series. She says that one of the most common things is that she'll hear about a book, she'll search for it, and then she'll wanna know two things. Like, is this book the first book in this series? Because she doesn't wanna add, like, the fifth book in a series to her want to read list.
Ste (55:56.286)
That's very good.
Adam (55:58.974)
And then she wants to know how many total books are in the series to know like what the commitment level is.
Like, is this a 12 book series? And so I was trying to dig in with her on like for that second part, the, how many books are in the series, it's not something you want to know in search or would you go to the book page to find that out? And I think she landed on, she would probably go to the book page to find that out, but it could be nice to have in the search results.
Ste (56:08.07)
Yeah.
Ste (56:26.331)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (56:29.99)
Yeah, what series is this from? All right, I'm just gonna write.
Adam (56:33.551)
Um, Sky Skyward.
Ste (56:37.037)
I work like this.
Adam (56:41.202)
Yes, I think that's the name of the series. Yeah, the Skyward series.
Ste (56:48.53)
the DemoAutoLayout. Okay. Is this confusing? Or, so, this would cover that case.
Ste (57:01.73)
If we maybe.
this and just show preview of this button.
Huh?
Adam (57:15.242)
Or we could even be explicit and say.
Ste (57:19.302)
Oh yeah. Why not?
Let me change the color of and do this with the same color.
Ste (57:36.802)
Yeah, this is nice.
Adam (57:38.782)
Yeah, and that seems pretty clear. Like, it's a lot of info right here.
Ste (57:46.937)
Yeah.
Adam (57:54.078)
I guess the, like, if I was going to improve this anymore, it would probably get into like more stuff that's just already on the book page.
Ste (57:54.822)
Yeah, this is great.
Ste (58:02.346)
Yeah, I mean, we want people on the book page, so I wouldn't put all the things in here. I think this is like, you could do so much just by searching for this. And this is the goal. I mean, you're trying to build your library, you're trying to search for books that you've heard of. We want this to be like a five second experience. So you can just go on the app or go on...
Adam (58:07.872)
Exactly.
Ste (58:31.319)
the browser, do this, search for the book, find it, and that's it.
Adam (58:38.21)
I have one other idea on something to add. And it's, this is one of those things that's on the book page, but it's, I feel like if we did it in a different way here, it might be neat. And it's like using.
Ste (58:54.31)
Yeah.
Adam (58:54.882)
And it's your friends that have read it. And it's like, if these were...
Ste (58:58.152)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (59:02.786)
Yeah, we even have the friends with.
preview.
Adam (59:10.598)
Yeah, I think that's where I copied this from from. But.
Ste (59:14.388)
Here we go. Yeah. Oh yeah, I just wanted to bring in the reviews as well. See how it looks like. So yeah, it could definitely be that or this. So, you know, if your friends review that, you'd know.
Adam (59:27.275)
Yeah.
Adam (59:34.04)
Yeah.
Ste (59:34.282)
Or just like that, yeah. And we can say, yeah.
Adam (59:38.91)
It's, and these would only be avatars of people you follow. It's not, it's not anyone else that would show up here. It wouldn't be random people. It would only be people you follow.
Ste (59:50.654)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think this is really, really nice. One of the things that I would look at and that's not browsable in the app as it is now is people who have read the same books. So I don't really know if someone read the book. If they left a review and I'm following them, I can see that, but...
There's no other way to know. So this, yeah, this is really good. Let's just put it here. And maybe we should put it in the...
Ste (01:00:33.254)
big search as well.
Adam (01:00:34.663)
Oh yeah.
Ste (01:00:36.622)
I'm gonna sync everything anyhow, so yeah.
Adam (01:00:42.382)
Do you think it needs some kind of label? Like other people like read by or is it?
Ste (01:00:54.213)
Let's see, 23.
Ste (01:01:05.868)
Friends read this or 23 readers in your network. Should they call them friends? Look friends.
Adam (01:01:10.397)
Friend reads.
Ste (01:01:19.43)
Well, yeah, that's a tough label. I'm guessing it would work even without the label, maybe.
Adam (01:01:27.178)
Yeah, I'm trying to think, like...
Ste (01:01:29.692)
Yeah.
Adam (01:01:32.718)
plus 15, friend or follow, no, yeah, friend reads. I don't know. So, I'm gonna go ahead and do this.
Ste (01:01:37.84)
Oh yeah.
Ste (01:01:43.378)
always. Yeah, let's just call them friends. They can be friends. If they're not friends, you cannot follow them.
Adam (01:01:47.316)
Thank you.
Adam (01:01:52.951)
Oh, I feel like this is looking really cool. I'm even more excited about search now than before this call.
Ste (01:02:00.87)
Well, that was the plan. Yeah, this is great. I think it's really, really comprehensive and it's going to be really nice to browse and find all these things. I'm hoping I'm actually going to do a design on that, even though we don't have discussions yet, but I'm going to put prompts in there as well. And I'm going to put reviews in. Do you think in this tab, there are other things like that?
Adam (01:02:24.557)
Hmm.
Ste (01:02:29.862)
which would be really important.
Adam (01:02:34.182)
Um, hmm, yeah, lists, prompts, and.
reviews seem to be the different entities that we have. I'm thinking lists. Lists could be a neat one if we can find, or prompts can be a neat one if we find lists and prompts that feature what you're searching for. That's gonna be a difficult search because with a book, you're matching on the title, with an author, you're matching on the name, but with a list, you can match on the title of the list and the description, but...
Are you pulling in just lists that feature the top result books? And then it becomes a little bit harder to do from a technical standpoint.
Ste (01:03:17.803)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (01:03:22.798)
Yeah, maybe we keep that. So it's only the name of the list.
Adam (01:03:27.338)
Yeah, like name of the list would be an easy one.
Ste (01:03:32.486)
They can go to the book page and see the list. It would be nice to have the lists where, for instance, Brandon Sanderson, a book by Brandon Sanderson is on and see all those lists, but I'm guessing we should keep that. That seems a lot more complex than everything else. So this was lists, prompts, and there was one other thing. Reviews.
Adam (01:03:53.486)
Yeah.
Adam (01:03:59.03)
We're talking discussions, but yeah, reviews.
Ste (01:04:02.054)
Yeah, discussions will come in here. I was gonna actually mock every one of these up for lists, prompts and reviews. It's simple because we're gonna reuse the same component that we use for the actual lists.
Adam (01:04:22.942)
Yeah, that'll be cool.
Ste (01:04:25.17)
So it would be basically this, and we just like reuse it for prompts as well. This would be like an adaptation of this. It would just be these with rankings. So yeah, I'm hoping that would clean up. Yeah. How we show results as well. That was going to be cool to see all this year and reviews would just be like the reviews we have.
Adam (01:04:37.901)
Yeah.
Adam (01:04:48.567)
Wow.
Adam (01:04:55.71)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is gonna be great. Our top requested feature in our user suggestions is being able to search for books by author. So I feel like we're hitting on that case first and foremost by when you type in an author name, you see the books for that author, and that covers the top case. And now we're just adding icing on top of that with all these other parts.
Ste (01:04:55.808)
Ta-da, over here.
Ste (01:05:21.002)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's really good. It's really good. I'm excited about this as well. Can't wait to, yeah, actually see it live. Yeah, it's gonna be a big, big improvement. And, you know, our readers have waited a long time for this, but, you know, hopefully it would be like everything they expected. And I'm glad we're using Algolia, or at least like thinking about using it, because...
Adam (01:05:26.626)
the
Ste (01:05:46.514)
It's a good, even if it's a bit more expensive, I think it would make up for the speed, which we will deliver this feature with and also the ease of use. So yeah, I'm hoping those things work out. Let me stop sharing. Okay.
Adam (01:06:01.322)
Yeah, yeah
Adam (01:06:09.202)
Well, yeah, thanks for yeah, thanks for designing that live. That was that was really cool.
Ste (01:06:15.758)
Yeah, well, good job boss.
Adam (01:06:19.175)
Cool. Well, I guess until next week, talk to you then.
Ste (01:06:23.942)
Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, everybody have a good rest of the week and see you for hardcover 13.
Adam (01:06:31.814)
next Monday. See ya. Bye.
Ste (01:06:33.294)
Yeah. See ya. Bye.