Archive for November, 2010
As you can probably see, we’ve just released the changes to the ‘Save’ interface. As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts on the subject, this was a ground up redesign that was discussed in great length with our design team, product management and engineering. Were the changes agreed upon unanimously? Absolutely not. Much like yourselves, we’re all passionate Delicious users and we don’t always agree on everything. We did however agree on most things and are all very happy with what we’ve produced. We’ve had the opportunity to use the interface for a month or so longer than you have, and any concerns we had have long since faded. We’ve all noticed a marked improvement in the speed of the process.
We want you to try the changes for a while and then let us know your feedback. After any major change like this it’s common to get some negative feedback as people rarely like significant changes in how they use a product. I doubt this will be any different, but I want to make sure that any tweaks we consider making are based on considered feedback.
Some of you have already raised some concerns, so let me cover those now so you understand the logic/what’s coming next.
Size of the ‘Notes’ field – while we know some users consistently use the notes field, it’s usage in general is low. Knowing that many users have complained about the size of the older save interface, we decided to reduce the size of the Notes field. We wanted to make sure that those that do use the ‘Notes’ field were impacted as little as possible. That being the case, the Notes field expands as you type. Right now it expands up to 5 lines worth which is more than enough given the average amount of characters per post that includes notes, but could be expanded by more.
Recommended / Popular Tags – Recommended and Popular tags have been focused into a general ‘Recommended’ tag list. This reduces real estate in the save interface and gives a more potent list of tags to select from. Ideally though we hope that tags are being entered based on what those links mean to you to make retrieval of that link easier in the future.
Bookmarklet no longer closes automatically – As a number of websites include an existing bookmarklet there was no real way for us to ensure the ability to Share was made available to those users. To do so, a ‘share’ confirmation was added to the bookmarklets. This means that those of you that use the basic bookmarklet will get a confirmation after each save. Ideally the Delicious extension resolves this issue for Firefox, Internet explorer and Chrome but we know there are some browsers that need to use the bookmarklet. We can consider offering a ‘don’t remind me about sharing’ checkbox on that confirmation page. That way you’ll only see it once. As I mentioned above, we’d like a little more feedback first and then we can look at these kinds of tweaks.
Extensions don’t have a ‘Share’ option – not yet, but they will do soon. We hope to have updated extensions for IE, Firefox and Chrome and available in December.
Were the save and share changes all we’ve been doing for the last few months? Not at all. A lot of the changes you shouldn’t see at all as they’re general code performance and maintenance changes that tend to go out with a release of this size. We’ve also been working on other features that aren’t quite ready yet, but most of the core code is ready and will make deploying those changes that much easier once the remaining parts are in place. Beyond those, there were 100+ small tweaks throughout the site. Those range from the obvious addition of the Yahoo! logo to adding ‘untagged’ as a bookmark filter in the ‘Display Options’.
Thanks for your patience and thank you for all the positive feedback too. We’re glad you’re liking the smaller, faster, lighter interface and as we expected, a number of you are discovering sharing options that have been available but not as discoverable as they perhaps should have been. Let us know what you like and dislike.
Regards,
Simon
November 30th, 2010
Knowing that Delicious is a darling Internet product for so many of you teachers and professors, (we currently have over 1,555,308 bookmarks saved under the tag teacher alone) we wanted to share this opportunity with you and ask your help in getting the word out.
This holiday season, Yahoo! is rallying teachers, students, and its entire Delicious community to join together in support of education. In partnership with Donorschoose.org, Yahoo! will donate up to $350,000 to bring classroom projects to life across the country.
The Homepages for Homerooms program is fun and simple. Public-school teachers can participate by posting projects on the DonorsChoose.org website and request items they need for their classrooms to flourish – books, art supplies, you name it! Teachers who already have projects on DonorsChoose.org can participate as well. After setting up projects, teachers and students can encourage their community to make Yahoo! their homepage in support of a favorite project by going to yahoo.homepagesforhomerooms.com. Yahoo! will also promote the program across the Yahoo! network. Every week from November 19 to December 23, Yahoo! will give up to $600 to projects that have generated the most homepages, with a total donation of $25,000 each week.
As a bonus, every week that 50,000 people set Yahoo! as their homepage, Yahoo! will double their contribution and fund $50,000 worth of projects that week. And if 500,000 make Yahoo! their homepage by the end of the five week campaign, then Yahoo! will kick in an extra $100,000 the last week!
The program is a no-cost, easy way to support teachers and students. By setting Yahoo! as your homepage, not only can you stay up-to-date on what’s happening in the world, you can feel good about supporting teachers through the DonorsChoose.org program (a 501c3 organization called the “future of philanthropy” by the New York Times).
How can you get involved? It’s easy!
1) Find a project you’d like to support by visiting yahoo.homepagesforhomerooms.com/projects. If you’re a teacher, you’ll find materials to help you quickly set up a project and spread the word.
2) Click “Support this project” and follow the easy steps to make Yahoo! your homepage. Each person can take this action once during this five-week campaign.
3) Spread the word to all teaching-related and educational groups, teachers, colleagues and friends – and help Yahoo! fund more and more classroom projects across the country!
And of course you can help get the word out even faster by bookmarking this Blog. Thank you for your help and support.
November 23rd, 2010
Last week we previewed the new look ‘Save’ interface, this week we’re showing you how sharing will work. Much like ‘Save’ there are plenty of changes coming based on our deep dive into how people have actually been using features.
I’d love to spin how great the usage numbers for our sharing functionality is, but the truth is it’s not been used as much as we’d like. At a top level the core reasons for this seem to be A) as the act of saving is a personal act and subsequently sharing isn’t always considered at the time of save, but B) the most apparent issue seems to be that it’s just not clear ‘how’ to share on Delicious.
We knew from the low share numbers that we would be separating Share from Save as sharing was a less common event. Based on those numbers, it was also clear that users very rarely shared with more than one recipient type. E.g. they would either share with Twitter or send to a Delicious user, but they would almost never happen at the same time. This meant that to make the flow clearer, it needed to be focused on the task at hand rather than throwing the kitchen sink at the problem. With this in mind we’ve broken Share up into the recipient types we currently support: Twitter, Delicious users and Email addresses.
This gave us the core mentality for our approach and after many hours of meetings, emails and cups of coffee discussing sharing we started building out this:
As you can see, like Save, it’s light and allows focus on the task at hand. You start with a choice of recipient services and create the share from the service you select. However, like ‘Save’ we had to make concessions to get us the best possible experience for the majority of our users. The most noticeable change beyond not being able to send to multiple recipient types at one time was the removal of the ‘Tweet all’ feature. The ‘Tweet All’ feature was removed because of concerns that some people might not have been aware that all of their public bookmarks were being shared on their Twitter account. We want to ensure the act of sharing with Twitter is something that is intended each and every time.
We’ve not just been removing functionality though in this redesign. A request we’ve seen from those who do actually want to share over the years, is the desire to Share links without having to actually save them. I.e. my friend is a HUGE fan of motorcycles, but I don’t need them in my account as I can’t ride a motorcycle. Right now, I have to save, share and then delete that link. Once these changes go live, you will actually be able to share links without needing to add them to your account first.
Hopefully in a few weeks time you’ll get to see these changes first hand.
BTW – don’t read anything into the example tiny URL used for Twitter, the image is from a design mock up. :)
November 2nd, 2010
