Feedback from Michael (alpha)

[swglad]

Skype call on Tuesday at 2pm

[swglad]

'1. Not immediately sure whether to set up a profile or whether it's going to be responsive immediately (add/delete/subscribe to feeds, categorization). Set a persistence expectation

[swglad]

'2. Is there a way to view all posts at the same time (all feeds views)? We're not sure if we want that.

Design Thought: How much of the organization of our data do we want to expose?

• Users like to see everything and make their own choices
  • Make it seems like the users have choices (even if they post)
  • Allow "all posts" but have it actually be only the top 4 in every feed/category.

[swglad]

'3. Can't mark some feeds as read ****** (e.g. specifically TechCrunch can't be marked as read ever)

[swglad]

'4. In the "tile view" on item card. Should be able to upvote/save INSIDE the card.

[swglad]

'5. Only place to add a feed currently is the Browse menu. Add a general button to add a feed. Perhaps put it in the sidebar underneath the collection.

[swglad]

'6. If there's a failed RSS feed, you don't get an error message as the user.

[swglad]

General RSS handling things

• We can't fix all the bad issues, so we should have some sort of "this feed validates under our assumptions but isn't great". Ex: Reuters doesn't have images --> THROW THE RSS FEED UNDER THE BUS AND DONT MAKE IT LOOK LIKE ITS OUR APP'S FAULT
• Loading bar
• How do we feel about allowing users to rename feeds to be what they want it to be?
  • Eg. "Free Republic" shows up as "Forum: News Activism" --> allowing a user to rename
  • "My Name" in a user_feed table
  • Use favorited feeds for weighting when doing Multi Document Summarization
  • Great validation on system b/c different summaries for same feeds

[swglad]

'7. Filtering so only show categories w/ at least XX items in it.

[swglad]

'8. Updated parsed time stamping error. Add dates ourselves.

[swglad]

'9. Sometimes unexpected behavior.

• Punch reload/refresh: automatically sets you back to categories tab even if you're looking at a feed, and very briefly flashes the login screen. Not ideal.

[swglad]

* Michael didn't try to actively break the site * - we should

--- Write a validation engine on the server side, process it separately, and then passes it back to client only if it likes what it sees. Something that isn't even part of the interface of the app and only passes things if its good.

--- IF you were a hacker, you'd try to overwrite the DOM and pass back evil things.

[swglad]

'10. Some rando could create a really ugly, evil, disgusting feed that, when added, would show up on EVERYONE ELSE's browse page.

Vandalism

• Create an RSS feed of ads, porn videos, etc.
• Create a list of banned feeds/urls
  • What if someone adds someone else's Twitter feed as an RSS (e.g. sociologist, pornstar)?

[swglad]

Like to see an aggregate result of the voting --> what is the impact? Statistics/heat maps of articles, trending articles --> Make seeing trending items the result of a click, not the initial

[swglad]

Don't show the number of votes until you vote on it (sociological)

• showing the vote polarizes new voters

[swglad]

How should we represent categories?

• Take the top N categories by number of items and show them as titles
• Grab first google image search result as imagine for a category

If categories are how we want people to use the site, what should we do?
- Tile view of top categories with some small number of top items within each category. "Big" visual is category and "small" visual is headline below that.
    * Tiles with lists, tiles with tiles inside them....play with it
    * Let people make a decision based on the content in the category, not exclusively the category name. 
           * Reproduce the user's "cluster of interest". 
           * Category --> Items --> Feeds in terms of usage

[swglad]

'11. Allow users to X-out categories and use the list of categories to just show and queue up new ones

• Makes users feel happy and in control

[swglad]

Generic things to keep in mind about categories

• Homogeneity within a feed is massively important
  • Feed is a data unit, but not a standard unit (NYTimes, 10k+ blog post, comic strips --> dealing with topic discovery is a tough issue that we should be cognizant of)

[swglad]

Long long long game: cut Feeds altogether

• Only add a feed to get the articles to get the categories
• User responsibility: read stuff
  • First encounter and second encounter w/ the site should be different

[alexgerstein]

We created the related issues so we can now close this one.