Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Each week Adam & Ste focus on a specific feature, idea or prototype in Hardcover and iterate on it together or with guests.
Adam (00:01.585)
Hey, hey, stay. How's it going?
Ste (00:03.928)
Hey Adam, is going well enjoying a nice evening in Paris now for a change. It's been very hot here so I got my windows open and yeah, it's feeling really good. Really happy to settle in after the big move. How about you?
Adam (00:14.677)
sorry, Ian.
Adam (00:21.063)
Yeah. Are you still living out of boxes or have you started unpacking?
Ste (00:25.25)
No, actually, yeah, I was very keen on getting everything out of those boxes out. And although it's like a bit of a mess, I still have to organize everything. And we've been like trying to split that baby time and, you know, getting accustomed with the neighborhood and everything. But it's going well. So everything's out of boxes. I think I have.
one box with books actually left so yeah I have to see where I'm gonna put those what else yeah everything's where it should be in its place finally yeah
Adam (01:03.667)
Nice. That's pretty fast.
Ste (01:07.572)
Yeah, it was and we didn't even, I mean, next time I think I'm going to hire movers because this time we just hired the Romanian guy with a van to like ship everything. yeah, my back kind of hurts. We got some help from our wise parents as well, but yeah, it's been kind of a marathon, but it's well, I mean, I think I lost a bit of weight even, but I don't mind.
Adam (01:33.968)
Were there any like weird like border related things? I know I have some friends who moved with like a cat and like that ended up being 10 times more difficult than any other logistics involved in the move.
Ste (01:48.394)
Yeah, the cat was literally like the hardest thing ever. Not even like the baby, my son, that was like very easy. But the cat, had like dossier like this thick with paperwork because of the British are the British are usually panicked about rabies. And yeah, that's why I had to come separately by train and my wife with my son and my cat.
had to travel by plane because that's the only way you could do it. But we've been preparing for like two months in advance. So luckily that meant no problems at the border, although, you know, lots of worries.
Adam (02:25.217)
it.
Adam (02:34.997)
Yeah. Well, it sounds like you've made it through the hardest parts, and now it's just the fun parts of exploring a new city.
Ste (02:43.892)
Yeah, exactly. It's beginning to be pretty fun. Yeah, how about you?
Adam (02:51.679)
think it's been a pretty quiet couple of, or last week, aside from some hardcover stuff we'll get into. I saw Deadpool and Wolverine with my wife and we went to a concert and saw Jewel and Melissa Etheridge, which was fun. So kind of enjoying the summer.
Ste (03:09.448)
Okay, nice. Yeah, yeah, you got it, you got it. How's the weather in Salt Lake City? it decent?
Adam (03:19.165)
It's been like 105 in the days, so that's like 40 degrees Celsius.
Ste (03:26.4)
Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot. Okay, I'll stop complaining about the weather then. Seems you have it like way worse stuff.
Adam (03:30.591)
So, but it's like desert heat. So you're not like sweating because it's so dry. It's kind of like Las Vegas. But it's nice in the mornings and the evenings, but during the day you just don't want to be outside.
Ste (03:41.208)
Okay.
Ste (03:48.17)
Yeah, well, yeah, at least it's not humid. mean, humid with heat doesn't go well. mean, yeah. Nice. Well, yeah, it's been exciting, you know, the past. also had two guests on Hardcover Live just as, you know, I was going through this, you were busy working on the reading journal. So it's been like quite eventful on this front as well. But I think we handled it pretty well.
Adam (03:56.723)
Yeah.
Adam (04:16.221)
Yeah, I, I was working on the hardcover report email that'll go out tomorrow. And it was like highlighting all the things from last month. And I was like, wow, we did, we did a lot in the last.
Ste (04:28.724)
Yeah, yeah, we actually did a lot, know, all things considered. And it's been good, you know, to have those guest features with Dan and Hailey. Actually, like lots of insights that came out of those, including something we'll be talking about today that you've been like shipping through like some kind of magic. And it's like live on Hardcover now.
And yeah, that's been like very, very exciting to see.
Adam (05:03.197)
Yeah, I, so far the reading journal and addition update, progress tracking, all that's been, it's, it's been working out pretty well. There's been like a couple of edge cases and areas of improvement, but overall I've been pretty happy with it. I think, I think that the biggest thing it highlighted is how, like, like previously for tracking progress, we didn't require
Ste (05:20.962)
That's good, yeah.
Adam (05:31.379)
to know the exact edition that you were tracking, but you were able to set the reading format. So you were able to say, I'm reading an audio book and we didn't care like the addition of the audio book, but with the new setup, you have to actually link it to the specific edition. So it's like an extra step, but that's kind of highlighted some gaps in our like additions in our database. So hopefully,
We've made it easy for people to add those missing additions and then it'll resolve itself in time. But I have a feeling right now we're going through a little bit of that, extra friction when people are adding those. So, we'll see how that goes and if we need to change anything from it, but I think it's in the right direction.
Ste (06:16.98)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, definitely. I saw some people on Discord were mentioning, you know, they're encountering some bumps because it's a different system than what we had before. But the good part is that now also if you're setting your addition to the one you are reading, it will be an addition that could.
appear in the system for any future reader on hardcover. So it's a bit of like a charity work you're doing for future hardcover readers because you're setting the edition and also you're helping yourself because you're keeping your reading accurate. yeah, think people are going to like once they get in the new system, it will pay off because those editions are published in the system right now and that book data becomes usable to others.
which is part of our goal of creating an open book network. when you're setting something in currently reading, you're participating in that mission. yeah, guess props to you for taking that extra time to complete that step.
Adam (07:32.231)
I'm happy with how it turned out. think some of those planning sessions we did on how that would work with the addition selector, those paid off because we had to re, we also redid the way that those drawers work. So when you have a dropdown on hardcover, if you're looking at it in a web browser, it looks like just a dropdown. But if you,
are on a mobile device, it comes up from a drawer at the bottom. like moving things into those reusable components where we can just like code it in one way and it works like a drawer on mobile and like a dropdown on desktop. That's also made a lot of things really easy. like in the reading journal part, for instance, when you're editing a reading journal or you're choosing those bulk actions, like make all journal entries private,
both of those use that same component as well as the book button itself. So it's like creating these reusable components like the addition selector are things that we're now able to reuse anywhere you need to select an addition across hardcover. So we're gradually creating that library of those components and then using them just becomes that much easier.
Ste (08:48.926)
Yeah, it's still like crazy to me how we manage to ship things. Usually this is the kind of, mean, this might be one of the most complex parts of a book network. I mean, selecting the actual edition, although it might not seem
stuff considering what happens on, and especially in the background, it's very, very, very complicated. And I think it's the reason why many people who set out to create a book network end up, you know, getting, getting stuck because this is one of the parts that to me has like so much complexity. And yeah, we somehow managed to, to, to ship that. And now we're iterating on the things that, you know, the, the, the small quirks, but
Yeah, it's there. And it's crazy how we could actually do that. it seems, I mean, usually the projects I've worked on, this is the thing that teams of 10 plus or maybe even tens of devs usually work on. But yeah.
You seem to have really powered through all of these features and the reading journal, because that's a huge thing as well. And now moving into stats, which is another very, very complex thing that with proper planning, hopefully will ship just as fast as with these really complicated features.
Adam (10:29.671)
Yeah, I'm, I'm excited to kind of focus on bugs and maintenance stuff this month while we're kind of planning out the design and final product of stats. That's, that's something that, you always did at my last job where we kind of had like three different phases and projects were always in one of the three phases where it was either like research design or development. And, now what's in development this month is going to
maintenance and bugs. What's in design is going to be stats and what's in research is going to be like new user, like retention, you know, understanding why people that joined hardcover might've left. And then, that'll just give us new information to do things on later.
Ste (11:19.348)
Yeah, yeah, it's good that we've structured them like that, and I'm excited about the design parts as well, but also the research part. It's going to bring up, I think, some interesting insights about how people use hardcover. Plus now, we also got to market these features, so I think we have yet to...
explain to our readers on Hardcover, like the full extent. mean, I'm sure people like already like explored a lot.
that's been published, but I feel like we should have like another push where we explain how to actually use the reading journal, how to actually, to improve discovery. I mean, some people might not even know that right now on hardcover, you can track your exact edition of a book and you can also add notes and quotes while you're reading it. And it's a pretty powerful way to...
add those notes and quotes. And this is building up later on for discussions, but it's going to be like really, really cool to see that play out and to have people add notes while they're reading instead of just a review at the end of the book. So you'll have like a
journal of each book that you've read. I can't wait to start adding quotes because that's one of my, one of the things that I missed in all the other.
Ste (13:02.36)
places. mean, the only system that worked for me is highlighting it's on the actual book, which is not like really ideal. And, you know, some readers might even hate that. But yeah.
Adam (13:17.037)
And once, and once we get a whole bunch of notes and quotes in the system, we'll be able to do really cool things with those notes and quotes. But any, any building of that now would be a kind of a premature cause there's not anything to show there, but things like, I have a feeling using some of the things we made for discussions, like that, that chart for like where in the book people are creating their discussions, we can have something like that for quotes and notes.
we can let people basically set the filter to where they are in the book and then they'll only see notes from up to where they are in the book and then they won't see quotes and things after that. And yeah, there's just a lot of really exciting things that I think depend on us doing the quotes part right and the notes part right, but I think we're on the right track.
Ste (14:14.806)
Yeah, yeah, we're getting there. feels like, you know, it feels within reach now. And I'm also like very excited about what this means to authors, because imagine like you're writing a book and, you know, you publish that book and you see like the graph where the notes and quotes go like really up at the point of the book on hardcover. And, you know, you might be surprised, you might not, but you might be surprised because, you
there's a scene in the book or there's like a part that people really love and you'd be able to, as an author, see that whole like neat graph of where people like interacted the most with your reading and that's gonna be like really, really good insight just by studying stuff that's public. don't even, I mean, this is not even like it's accessible to everyone.
Adam (15:01.749)
Yeah, it, it kind of reminds me of how on a, like either on Kindle or on something like medium, when you're seeing like a highlight and it says like, you know, like 123 other people highlighted this, this paragraph. So it's, it's how do we make a books kind of more like that, but without creating an entire e -reader.
Ste (15:13.847)
and clips.
Ste (15:27.05)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it's, you know, the actual like meta part of that, just like not seeing it as you're reading it. Some networks, I will not name which, but they do that. And I think that's a little bit annoying, just reading stuff and seeing, some people reacted to this paragraph in the book. I think a lot of people knowing our readers on hardcover would not like that.
not like that social interaction while they're reading, but after like that meta part when they're adding a note and they're like seeing, because it's something separate that you do from reading, I'm presuming, you know, that's gonna be like really, really cool to see and interact with that whole like.
series of interactions, it feels better than just having that. Yeah, great. So that said, should we jump on to actually designing some stats? Here we go. Yes.
Adam (16:32.165)
Yeah, so I think that's what that's our focus for today, right?
Ste (16:38.23)
So I was hoping we could basically go through the stats where we left off last time, and maybe we can even look at the things you've done with reader similarity and maybe even discuss a bit about that if we have time, if not just like the overall stats. But there are some stuff in there that we might take and put it in the overall stats. So let me share my Figma.
Adam (17:07.294)
Yeah, sounds good.
Ste (17:07.81)
quick and we can jump right on
Ste (17:20.92)
There we go.
Ste (17:26.978)
Just to give everyone a bit of a recap, this is where we were last time, where we were working on stats, a way to select the time period for stats. So between which
periods between which dates you are seeing those stats and how do we make it easy to select the most common use cases, like a month or a year or if you want something custom. So bridging that gap between these two cases. And then just having these really neat components that updates.
really dynamically and where you have like as much of an incentive to share them or to publish them somewhere as possible. So we've got the books read sort of I'm going to name these widgets. Maybe that's not the best name, but
I don't know, do we have a better one?
Adam (18:44.401)
Yeah, cause this is like the, the covers that would be shown here would be like your five star reads, right? Or your highest rated reads in that period.
Ste (18:54.018)
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Well, if it's a year, it could be like the highest rated. If it's like a month, maybe you've just read three books. even though you rated one, maybe we can even show the ratings if like it's like less than a number of books. So if it's like a yearly stat, you get all the covers. If it's a monthly stat and you only get like three books, let's say.
I'm curious, like, what's the average number of books a hardcover reader reads per month? But I'm just going to say three. I'd say three. So you read these three books. Maybe you get these and there's a lot of stuff going on here.
Ste (19:56.376)
So you just have three books. You have these three books and maybe they're smaller and maybe you have the rating. Let me fetch the rating real quick from where. Sorry everybody, I'm moving a bit.
Ste (20:19.832)
here and I'm putting it.
Ste (20:24.782)
over here so this is a five star read this is a five star read and maybe this is a 2 .5 star read
Ste (20:38.744)
So maybe if it's a monthly stat, you we decide whether to show only the covers or the covers and the ratings. Does that make sense?
Adam (20:54.033)
Yeah, yeah, maybe we can come back to that since we might end up having another widget that shows like top rated or things like that. But we can pencil that in as an option.
Ste (21:05.151)
Yeah, true. Yeah, true, true, true. This is like a good theme because where we show covers, depending on the period, sometimes you're going to have a lot of covers and sometimes you might even just have one cover. So I guess we'd have to differentiate between... Maybe we'll
Adam (21:10.493)
Eh, eh.
Ste (21:30.862)
three levels of widgets or like, yeah, different, maybe if it's just one cover, let's say you've read like it's highest rated book. We make the cover real big and offer more info.
Adam (21:44.989)
Yeah, we could definitely change the size of it pretty easily and then kind of just make it fill all available space depending on what you're reading or how many you've read.
Ste (21:56.554)
Yeah. I guess first we could try to iron out what components to show here, and then we can decide, go into details on each component, because some of these are going to appear on your dashboard as well. So I'm thinking if they're on your dashboard, they're going to be even smaller or larger, so it makes sense to have different views, like we did with lists.
You know?
Ste (22:30.01)
Cool. So for stats, actually, that's we could take a step back. Do you think it's a good place regarding the way you choose the periods that the stats are shown?
Adam (22:54.881)
yeah, so I think the idea was like when you hit this page, like there's this underlined thing that would say like all time, for instance, the first time you load it or something like that, or Adam's life and books and life would be this underlined editable field. And if you click on it, it would be editable or are we saying it would be like only editable from this part?
Ste (23:24.911)
No, it would actually be editable from both sides just to make it easy. So you could edit
Ste (23:36.982)
it have this or let's
Yeah, items life in books. And you'd click on life. You'd get basically this.
Ste (23:53.006)
not drop down. What was this actually? That's a good, it was, yeah, it was a drop down or a pop over that let you select the period and it would show all your available years for which you have book data. And then if you click each year, you'd be able to select a month.
Adam (24:02.249)
Yeah.
Ste (24:20.975)
or we also did like this where you would just
Adam (24:29.39)
yeah, have like...
Ste (24:29.622)
No, I think that was like the last one, right?
Adam (24:36.159)
Cause ideally for what we need to select is what the, what we always need to do is have a duration, like a start date and an end date. And sometimes we can abbreviate that by just having them selected a year or a month. And then we're able to set both the start and the end date based on that month. So I guess, I guess one of the questions is, we want to have it down to the day or do we only want to have it for like month spans?
Ste (24:56.236)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (25:05.398)
Well, I think it should let you choose the actual day. So the way I was thinking to do it here is if you select a year and just like close it, you'd get that year. If you select the month, basically if you'd be here and select February, you'd get like this calendar where, you know, it would say February.
And if you'd close it, it would be February, but I'm not sure that's like the best, the best option. What do you think? Yeah.
Adam (25:43.421)
I we could get away with not having it be down to the day. I think we could make it just months. The more I've been thinking about this, I'm thinking how often would I ever wanna say between January 15th and February 15th? And the only time I think I'd want to do that is if the date were February 15th and I was looking at in the past month.
So it's almost like one option could be like just setting these dates as months, but then maybe have an option also for like past 90 days, past month, past year. And that's that's independent of a start and end date. That's just like setting the start end date based on today's date.
Ste (26:38.604)
Yeah, that sounds good. I'd be more of a fan of like some really cool defaults to show these instead of, yeah, basically having it down to the day because it will get confusing. I think the most common cases would be
yearly and monthly. So you'd want to see your June, July, April reading and you'd want to see your 2024 reading or your like life in books.
I think that would be like the actual ranking. Maybe it's different, but it's just a hunch. So yeah, I'd be done for that. So I think we have this component. Do you think that maybe we can get away with doing this past month, past 60 days?
past 90 days.
Adam (27:53.287)
Yeah, I think something like that could work. So that would be selecting.
So that would be, that would allow you to see the stats for like, you know, assuming this was the entirety of the component, you would be able to see stats for either an entire year, an entire month, a single month, or a relative timeframe from today.
Ste (28:22.463)
Yes, exactly.
Adam (28:25.722)
Yeah, I think, so the, I guess the downside of that is you wouldn't be able to say like, I wanna see stats from March to August. You would only be able to see like March stats for March. But I think that's okay. I feel like what you'd normally wanna do is see stats for.
Adam (28:46.601)
just a date. Brian our chat is saying we need to have a date picker in there.
Ste (28:52.206)
We aren't gonna get away without the date picker.
Adam (28:56.917)
I feel like that's what we're trying to solve. We're like, is there a way to do this without a date picker? To be determined, but yeah. I guess.
Ste (29:00.597)
here's the chat. There we go. Yeah. Yeah.
Ste (29:10.06)
That's, we did have like, could do.
Adam (29:15.891)
Like specific date. Yeah. Cause at that point, like maybe, maybe what we do do is we get rid of the calendar component. Cause I don't think the calendar component is going to be as useful for this because like if you're, if you're spanning a single month, the calendar component is pretty useful. So that's for like dates read. But if you're saying like, yeah, like one date to three months from now using a calendar component to select that start and end date gets confusing fast.
Ste (29:45.718)
Yeah, exactly. I'd be like much more of kind of doing this plus it sets, you know, I guess the way we want people to like see these, I think monthly, you know, is...
very useful. also, yeah, I guess if you were reading something and let's say you'd want to see the number of pages per day you've read between 12th of both of March and 31st of April, maybe that would be like a good use case for a custom date. So maybe we should have it there. So you're basically thinking to have this.
And for the custom dates to maybe have something like this and for these to open up a calendar component or just have like our calendar component open up if you select custom date.
Adam (30:46.951)
Yeah, kind of what I was imagining is like, maybe we always show it like this with the start and end date.
And then if you click on the start date and then you were to select, let me copy this. So if you were here and you selected this first one, it would by default show.
show this.
Adam (31:28.873)
And wait, maybe, let's see. yeah, so let's figure this out. So if you selected this, you're trying to set the start date for a range.
Adam (31:48.681)
Feels like there's two things you might wanna do in that case. One is I wanna set a start date and an end date. One is I just wanna set the start date and hardcover should set the end date for me. So what if this dropdown, when you click on this, would show, actually I guess it's more, it's closer to this actually.
Adam (32:18.185)
it would show something like that. And maybe the bottom option here is like the custom date.
Adam (32:32.117)
So if you selected 2024, like let's say you clicked on this, you click on 2024, what it would do would, at that moment, it would set the start and the end time to be January 1st to December 31st, 2024. But it would also bring you into this and it would have.
All of these ones selected, like January, February, March, April, December, all of them would be like the purple selected color. And if you clicked on one of those, it would, like if you clicked on August, it would unselect like the months after August. So that way it was like January to August selected.
Ste (33:26.606)
Yeah, I'm wondering if like from a UX point of view, this is a good option, but yeah, I'm wondering like if at this point, so if you want to select a month, aren't we making it like if you want to select a month, we should make it like really easy to do that. So if you click on 2022 and you want to select
Adam (33:35.101)
It's hard.
Ste (33:55.692)
I think it might be confusing if they're all selected. I think that's my feeling. Let's just make them so there. didn't select these. crap. OK. Because I think it's hard to tell which. So if I was here and I would click on August, I would feel like it should only deselect August. And if it would not.
Adam (34:15.559)
Yeah.
Ste (34:25.662)
if it would like deselect all of these. So it would, -huh, yeah. So maybe we should just like, if we just have March. So when you go here, maybe there's nothing selected and this date changes. So this is like January 1st, 2022 to December.
Adam (34:30.695)
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right.
Ste (34:54.574)
and 31st, 2022. And could we make this like drag and select kind of thing? That would be neat, but also like, maybe it would work. So kind of like a multi -select. So if you select like January to September.
you could do that but if you only tap one of them you only get that month so if you tap march it's gonna change to march 01 to march 31st would that make sense?
Adam (35:37.429)
So that would mean like you clicked on this first one, you selected 2022, this came up, and then you clicked on March.
Yeah, I think that makes sense for that.
Ste (35:53.346)
Yeah, the time picker is like more complicated than I was first thinking. Maybe we could like, yeah.
Adam (36:01.005)
I guess one simplified way. like, you know, if we were to like remove all of this and one other way of doing this is we, I'm just gonna move all these and brainstorm. The simplest MVP of this is you click on this, it pulls up a date picker and in the bottom of the date picker, we have buttons
Ste (36:17.292)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Adam (36:29.311)
past year, all time, and that. this date picker isn't gonna be a range date picker. It's just gonna be a start date date picker. And when you click on this end date, that's the end date date picker. So you're not trying to set a date range in one calendar widget.
Ste (36:29.516)
Ste (36:48.704)
Yeah, it's just okay. Yeah, this is is great. Maybe we could even have like, yeah
Adam (36:54.168)
And like a drop down for a year where it's like, well, hmm.
Ste (37:02.966)
Yeah, the year is a bit of a... I mean, that's how I ended up with this really complicated thing. Because if you want to select a certain year, you kind of bump into that. let's just... We could just leave it like that. So it should be like past month and what else was...
Adam (37:11.261)
Yeah.
Ste (37:34.2)
supposed to.
Ste (37:38.284)
be in here past month and past year maybe.
last year, this past year, if it's March, yeah, you're
Adam (37:53.093)
Because by default, when you load the page, it's going to be all time. it's like when you click all time or when it loads with all time.
Ste (37:58.39)
Mm -hmm.
Adam (38:07.135)
think we are going to have to default this to like null to null and null to null will mean like beginning of time to now.
Ste (38:16.108)
Yeah, set date. Yeah. I think that would work. I mean, I think the best way to explain it is when you're selecting an airline ticket and you're either like, want it, they give you the option to choose the whole month. We should add the whole year on top of that and all time. But basically it's like you go on Skyscanner and.
you either choose tickets on the 31st of July or plus minus some dates, or you can select whole month and it shows you like ticket ranges. So I guess we could have like a choose month over here where you could like choose the month. And it would basically be like these buttons where we set the dates because else I'm thinking, you know, it would be hard to set the dates.
Adam (39:14.042)
This is how they do it in Stripe when you're exporting, which I was just kind of curious. But we wouldn't need a today one, of course. And our default would be all.
Ste (39:16.273)
here we go. Yeah. Yeah. huh.
Ste (39:27.5)
Yeah, this is pretty good. So current month, last seven days, last month, all.
Adam (39:34.67)
But what's interesting is that this comes from, like you click a button called export and it brings up this modal to set it. So they're not trying to do it in a dropdown. They're like, let's just make the entire thing a modal.
Ste (39:49.16)
yeah, well, let's make the entire thing a modal then. I I'd be like totally down for that. I think we're using like modal slash drawer on the app. So that's like a pattern that we've gotten readers used to. So yeah, we might as well do that.
Adam (40:08.147)
I think it's like a, yeah, should it be a modal drawer or a dropdown drawer? But yeah, I guess it depends on.
Ste (40:16.674)
Well, it should take over the entire screen because like you want to focus on setting the date and then you want to see the stats. So you don't want like fiddle with it too much. You just want to like set it and then.
analyze the stats for that entire time period, share stuff, know, that kind of thing. I'm guessing like, however we do it, think like having a button that brings up something on the screen is a good way to do it. So this would basically be, so it could be like this and...
You could also have the map icon. this would be a menu to display all the stats. And this can be either a model or a drawer that comes up from the bottom. basically what can happen is you have an overlay that's kind of like this. And then you have the calendar.
Where are the other things? God damn it.
Ste (41:34.572)
So yeah, well, all with nice little background, of course, not like that, but yeah, with the calendar. And it could basically be these options. So it could be like...
Ste (41:58.414)
this model, but what do you think about like the actual like idea of a model? Would that be?
Adam (42:06.777)
I think it could be a drawer in mobile and then a modal in desktop maybe.
Ste (42:14.284)
Yeah, of course. Yeah. Just like we do with the reading journal, right?
Yeah, yeah, let's do that. So current month and maybe we put, like this, July 1, July 31. Is that a good format for the date? I think it's US, right?
Adam (42:37.715)
Yeah, I can I can understand that as a American. It's better than seven, seven, one or, yeah, using using numbers.
Ste (42:43.118)
Nice, okay, yeah, I can understand this is European, so. week. Yeah, exactly. 24 last week. Yeah, last week, maybe. Last month. No, last week, current month. Okay, let's say it's July.
Ste (43:10.392)
brain isn't functioning with dates.
Ste (43:16.088)
last year.
Ste (43:21.876)
or we could have like, big ear.
Ste (43:30.858)
And this could be like just the.
Adam (43:36.213)
I guess one of the difficulties of their date picker is that they don't make it easy to select a year. if you, if I wanted to select last year, a 2023 beginning of the year to the end, I'd have to open the calendar widget, select the first, go to the end date, click forward 12 times, and then select the end of 2023. So yeah, they don't make it easy to give a date range.
Ste (44:05.762)
Yeah, maybe we could make a nice tab navigation like we have on the library. we could just have this kind of thing. Let me put this in a nice little frame.
Adam (44:05.886)
a year date range.
Ste (44:25.306)
Sorry, I want to track that again because my mouse is not working again. So what happened to all the...
Ste (44:48.535)
Okay.
Adam (44:52.213)
think one difficulty with that is that some people might have so many years. I know I have tracking back to 93. There's going to be a lot of options for those years.
Ste (45:02.441)
wow.
Ste (45:08.814)
Well, on the, like, I mean, in which cases are you going to check, like, your reading from 1995? It's not going to be like a lot of times, probably like it's going to be like the past years or so. So I'm guessing.
Adam (45:24.241)
Yeah, yeah, the most common would be, yeah, the last couple years for
Ste (45:32.174)
So if this was a thing that moved like left and right, even if you like wanted to check 95, you'd just like scroll a little. I don't know if that would be like annoying or not, but I think it could like.
Adam (45:50.064)
Or there's like a, one of these is
Adam (45:55.817)
So what if...
for like month and year, it's like a select dropdown and like there are options for like 2024, 2023, 2022. And then for like
Ste (46:11.603)
yeah, of course, yeah.
Adam (46:15.837)
Maybe for like one of them could be by month. And then by month, it could be like current month and then like the previous months. That way, like these two could kind of be combined into one option too.
Ste (46:30.062)
So kind of like
Adam (46:38.129)
or I was thinking almost like a separate ones, if this were down here and then this was like by year.
Ste (46:54.446)
justify and group everything though, sorry. Sometimes I hate all the layouts.
Adam (47:12.553)
Likewise, this one could be like, this is the default. And,
Ste (47:17.84)
Okay, yeah, yeah,
Adam (47:20.507)
and like by month.
Ste (47:28.27)
I think that worked. Gosh, this is like way more complicated than...
Adam (47:33.927)
I know it's like we could just create two date pickers and be done with it, but we want to make it easy for people to select date ranges.
Ste (47:41.394)
Yeah, exactly. mean, most people will like use this to like be very, yeah, it's hard to select like the best year. So it'd have to jump to January 1st and then it could work, but yeah, let's maybe.
Adam (47:59.315)
Yeah, I think this would allow us to kind of get rid of these three options. And then.
Ste (48:08.098)
And then it's just a custom. Yeah. Okay.
Adam (48:14.153)
Yeah, because this is really what it comes down to.
Ste (48:18.722)
Yeah, exactly.
Ste (48:24.92)
think this is good for now. So when you tap like.
Ste (48:34.254)
It should show like from 2, right?
Adam (48:39.438)
Yeah, think, what if, yeah, I think in this case,
Adam (48:48.167)
Okay, so I'm thinking like when you see the from to, if you've selected one of these options, maybe it should say that and it should only give you one field. So it should say like all time and it not give you a start date and an end date or same with by year. It should just say for like, yeah, like we had it before. I feel like we're working our way back to where we were like three weeks ago.
Ste (49:10.326)
Yeah, kind of like we had it. Yeah.
Ste (49:15.732)
Wow. Yeah, exactly.
Adam (49:17.299)
Which is a good sign. It means the same solutions are coming up multiple times.
Ste (49:21.886)
Yeah, you know, it's like that every time we design something. I remember discussions with the salon and I think for every feature actually, you know.
Adam (49:31.431)
Yeah. So if you did select custom and you did select a start and an end date, then you would see this. And then you would be able to kind of quickly change those dates. But if you selected a month or a year or all time, you would see kind of like this generic representation of that date range.
Ste (49:39.052)
Yes.
Ste (49:51.33)
Mm -hmm
Adam (49:55.081)
Yeah. And maybe like custom, like if it's, if it's selected and it's highlighted, then, yeah, we showed like the date range after it, like kind of like
Ste (49:55.181)
Yeah.
Ste (50:10.614)
Yeah. Well, this one is good. I think it's, this is in a good place. Basically it was about selecting dates for, for. Yeah. Well, this is going to be like really important because you know, right now it's not like the.
Adam (50:21.577)
I feel like we simplified it.
Ste (50:33.666)
most ideal navigation. I feel like if we nail this, it's going to make sharing the stats and viewing the stats a lot easier.
Ste (50:47.616)
Okay, well I think this is good and
for the actual stats, want to, mean, basically, this is the stuff that we have right now. I'm assuming this we'd keep and maybe add, it differently and add things that are not here. And we can show maybe a sneak.
of what we've been working on. Well, some of it you can see live, but this is what we're thinking could be like another iteration on the similarity stats. So basically the similarity stats are a thing that Haley Hughes suggested like just last week, Adam implemented an MVP. So you can actually like see your similar stats with any reader on hardcover if,
Adam (51:26.623)
Yeah.
Ste (51:54.191)
you go to, we can share the exact way you do it, but basically, what's the URL at them for?
Adam (52:04.423)
It's in the it's in the labs drop down of the discover. I think it's slash similarity.
Ste (52:08.266)
yeah, here we go, Yeah, reading similarity. And basically here, it's like similar stats, which could be favorite books you have in common. So these are books that each of you rated five stars. Books the first reader loves, but the second reader doesn't. So five stars and one star, or this could be a range. Like it could be between one
two and half stars and four and five stars for, you know, someone loves, someone hates.
Adam (52:43.605)
I think I implemented it as one person rates it as a four and a half or above and the other person rates it as three or below.
Ste (52:50.74)
Okay, here we go. Perfect. Right on the intuition on that one. Then we could do stuff like favorite authors. Like if you read like multiple books from one author, we could maybe get the average rating or something like this and yeah, list authors, list the book by rating so you can see which of you rates books higher or lower.
This one is pretty interesting. unique favorites, books that someone rated highly that are not in your favorites and the other person hasn't read. So if you read the book and you rated it highly and the other person doesn't have it in their library, all this could be like a
opportunity to say, okay, so I know we're very similar. they read and rated this book really highly and I haven't like heard of it. So this could be a good one. Yeah.
Adam (53:54.793)
Yeah, good discovery mechanism. And we could even sort that if we wanted to by their match percentage on the books that, so like, know, books Adam has rated highly, but Mari hasn't. If Mari was viewing this page, we could sort these by books Adam rated four and a half stars sorted by match percentage for Mari.
Ste (54:18.84)
Wow, okay, yeah, that'd be very neat.
Ste (54:26.37)
We can just add the filter. mean, yeah, somewhere over here. But yeah, this could be like the unique favorites. And I'm thinking, know, it could be interesting depending on your libraries. But if you're like really similar with someone, it could like pop, it could like show pretty interesting choices.
Then this is a bit more like if you're tracking your reading, this is books read over time. And this is similar to what we have here, which is average pages read. So this would be like average books read if you're tracking on hardcover. It could be monthly maybe. I don't know.
Adam (54:59.455)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (55:11.244)
yeah, I put a selector here as well. So it could be monthly or yearly, I guess.
Adam (55:17.577)
Yeah, we could probably have it adjust based on the time span that both users have been on the platform. If both of them have years of history, we could do it over years. If they don't both have years of history, then we could default it to monthly.
Ste (55:33.29)
Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Maybe we can even have it monthly and that's it. Or yeah, I'm just going to leave this here. Then I think someone switched the series in common. series that you both read and maybe you could have like the... So for instance, if you
Adam (55:45.725)
and
Ste (55:55.618)
both read the first two books, but only one of you read the last book, it would show here. yeah, basically this would be like the series in common. Yeah, then another very cool one that I think, beginning about.
Adam (56:07.486)
Yeah, that's cool.
Ste (56:19.018)
suggested on this court, who I'm saying that, right? Is books that someone owns and that the other person wants to read. So if you have a book in your own drawer that someone else, that the other reader wants to read, it could be like a really good opportunity to highlight those books and maybe ask them to borrow them
Adam (56:29.531)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (56:48.194)
like we'd have to find like a way for them to connect, but it could be interesting anyway. So if there are two friends that track their huge libraries on hardcover and they aren't aware of the books that each other has, this could be a way of highlighting that thing. yeah.
Adam (57:15.081)
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea.
Ste (57:16.886)
If you have that book on your, yeah. Basically see the ratings as well. And this is like nice genre overlap. So, yeah. How much, I'm not sure how this would be calculated, but I'm guessing like a one to four, a one to five score on sci -fi
Adam (57:26.868)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (57:44.322)
Like the main genres, horror, sci -fi, fantasy, adventure, young, adult and crime could be, you know, it could depend on the actual most genres in common.
Adam (57:58.357)
There is another way I was brainstorming visualizing this. while I was watching the Olympics, was like trying to understand like how do we showcase similarity between two genres? And this is the visualization I came up with for it. So the idea is, let's see, I have a circle here and it would be
it would represent like one person's.
Adam (58:34.021)
reading of a specific genre. like, this would be like, the number of science fiction books, the size of this would be the number of science fiction books that Adam read. And the idea would be like, this is like the average rating. like, you from a star to five star. And so you're able to see, like, okay, Adam is like really into that genre, but
Ste (58:52.77)
Nice.
Adam (59:04.209)
maybe like Mari's color for it be smaller and it would be like
And maybe when you highlight over one of them, highlights the other person's.
Adam (59:24.745)
like related genre. it like, so like when you when you hover over this, it would also highlight this one. So you would be able to see like where they're where the other person science fiction one is. And maybe like, you know, Mari has a really big one over here that represents like, you know, some other completely different genre and then have something over here that represents that. And the one thing I wasn't sure
Was
So like these wouldn't have any text until you hover over them.
Ste (01:00:02.954)
Yeah, that sounds pretty good. yeah, I mean, I love this. I love that it actually weighs them with the rating as well. And I'm guessing we could have a tooltip that would just appear and I wouldn't mind
hovering over each of these really nice bubbles. And yeah, I'm assuming they would get smaller and closing to zero, right?
Adam (01:00:34.783)
Yeah, and I think in my initial idea of this, the Y position was gonna be for correlation. so this would like, whenever there's something here, it would be something here. And whenever there's something there, there would be like a corresponding one here.
Ste (01:00:46.828)
Okay,
Ste (01:00:54.963)
Okay, gotcha. So it would actually be something like this
Adam (01:00:58.57)
Or maybe it wouldn't be below, maybe it would be like on the side because the y -axis is determined by the, so the y -axis would be determined by the difference between the ratings between the two people. So like the bigger the difference between like this and this, the bigger disagreement there is between these people's ratings. But if they're both like here, that would mean they're both rating them very similar.
Ste (01:01:18.894)
Okay, gotcha.
Ste (01:01:25.268)
Okay, and the size of the bubble would actually mean like how much weight that genre has in their reading, right? On that period. Yeah, this sounds great. It should also like have like a small, I guess, description.
Adam (01:01:33.769)
Yeah, like how many books they've read in that genre.
Ste (01:01:48.35)
some of these. think it's going to be like important, but yeah, I love it. Let's just do it like this. Do you know how to actually like, I have no idea how to create something like that.
Adam (01:02:02.544)
yeah, it's all just SVG.
Ste (01:02:06.026)
Okay, okay, SVG is okay. I'll go with your lead on that one. This, yeah, this is going to be like great. And basically, we can set the opacity of these to
Adam (01:02:12.115)
it
Ste (01:02:23.95)
Well, actually, when you have a rover, then it can set the opacity of the others to 50. So you can only see basically these and have a tool tip that is basically positioned depending on this window.
Adam (01:02:29.67)
Mm -hmm.
Adam (01:02:44.179)
Yeah, and maybe some like, you know, it adds like a border or something so that it.
Ste (01:02:50.14)
yeah, yeah, border as well. Yeah, this is looking good. This is looking great. Well, I think we actually made more progress on the reading similarity than on the actual stats. But this is good. I think people really, really want this. And if we make this page really neat and shareable, I think people are going to try it
their friends are going to try it with people they follow. So you could basically over here, I was thinking, so the changing reader part isn't included and you just see the comparison here without having that first part. Maybe it can be either overlay or a modal or a drawer that comes in from...
Ste (01:03:45.813)
underneath just like we did with like the stats previously with the date picker and the way we did for the reading journal as well. And basically you'd have like compare readers, you could set the username and it would bring out Apple search box just as we do now and when they're like found you could see their
profile picture appear here for confirmation. And then when you click calculate similarity, it would start generating these components.
Adam (01:04:20.851)
Yeah, and maybe like this little card right here, we could reuse that card on the profile page with the link to this similarity page. That way, because all that page is doing is filling it in with your data and the person who you're looking at the profile of.
Ste (01:04:32.172)
Yeah, and this would
Ste (01:04:39.896)
Yeah, and basically this would be like calculate similarity, add them and...
Adam (01:04:46.389)
Whoever's profile you're on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ste (01:05:00.174)
Calculate similarity.
Yeah, great idea. Nice. Yeah. And I was working on it for desktop as well. These are like two ways we could show like that header. Maybe it's like different on desktop so you could see like, you know, kind of like they do in like sports, like one to the side, one to the other side. And just like maybe have
Like the big components we can show like you did currently on like full width and then for the others, we can like split them on two rows. I think that could look good. And it's also like, it's similar to the dashboard.
Adam (01:05:48.777)
Yeah, yeah, I'm this already.
Ste (01:05:53.069)
Nice.
Adam (01:05:54.845)
I have a feeling that this will actually be easier than the stats page. Just because we're not worried about date ranges and things like that. It's just the overlap between two data sets. And yeah, that'll be an easier problem.
Ste (01:06:00.09)
Hahaha yeah!
Ste (01:06:12.244)
Yeah, maybe we can. mean, this is like a really exciting feature. And shout out to Haley again for mentioning it because, yeah, it's given us a lot of stuff to work on. I mean, evidently, you know? So I think, let me stop sharing this. I think we're out of time. So yeah, I think it's a really good, should we do it like before, like the big stats page while we figure out like the quirks of the?
Adam (01:06:41.811)
Yeah, I bet we could do it before. What's out now took me an hour and a half. So I have a feeling doing the rest of it won't be too bad. I bet the hardest part will be some of the data visualizations. And those don't even need to be in the V1. We could add those anytime.
Ste (01:07:00.532)
Yeah, that sounds great.
Adam (01:07:01.589)
One of the things Haley mentioned when I sent it to her was, it'd be great to have a breakdown of the stats that overlap versus the ones that don't. For example, 80 % of the books in common were of this genre, or they were by queer authors, or they were books over a specific page count. So it's like, it's a quicker, high -level understanding of not just the books in common, but the traits from those books that they shared.
Ste (01:07:32.194)
Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, send those over to me. I'm gonna like, I mean, that like, we could just like drop that in design. I think it would work out of the box, I guess.
Adam (01:07:36.95)
You
Adam (01:07:42.825)
Yeah. Almost like, yeah.
Ste (01:07:44.598)
Yeah, that's very interesting, yeah.
Adam (01:07:49.525)
Cool, well, this has been a fun design session.
Ste (01:07:53.848)
Yeah, lots of ground cover. And yeah, for that, I was just reading what Maria told us in the chat. Definitely, we'll have a custom date range picture in there. This has been like, yeah, I think we're going to, I'm going to like, we're probably going to iterate async a bit more on it and then start actually doing the actual stats, which might even be like
you know, easier parts since most of them, guess, would just have to revamp from the current ones. And there's like the backend work, which, you know, you'd have to do to get them server rendered, right?
Adam (01:08:39.529)
Yeah, I think, yeah, I'm not too worried about that. That'll be the fun part. Well, I guess the hard part is the data visualization server rendering, but the stats part, the rest of it, not too much.
Ste (01:08:50.218)
Yeah, well, we'll nail that. I think we're pretty from the looks of it, think. Once we nail down which stats...
we're actually going to show. And if anyone watching has any idea of a stat they'd want to see, just send it to us, drop it on Discord, drop it via email, because we're going to basically try to make it if you want. I'm sure it's a useful stat. So yeah.
when we get to each one of those, I think this is a good month for doing that. We're probably going to spend maybe even another session on this, but yeah, let's see how it goes. Great. Perfect. Awesome.
Adam (01:09:37.875)
Sounds good. thanks today and yeah, I'll talk to online. See you all later. Bye.
Ste (01:09:45.942)
Yeah, see you all later. See you all on Discord. Bye.