Prismatic launches a full redesign and shares their awesome design process

http://blog.getprismatic.com/blog/2012/11/29/new-prismatic-web

by janaboruta • 14 years ago

51 29 14 years ago

blog.getprismatic.com

jagira• 14 years ago

DAE hate their font choice? I guess the previous font stack of sans-serif/verdana fonts looked better.

bradfordcross11• 14 years ago

What in particular do you dislike?

melchebo3• 14 years ago

I'm not OP, but in general you don't want to use serif fonts on (72dpi) LCDs. Maybe you all have retina display screens at work, on but regular low resolution screens serif fonts slow down reading speed.

See this site for example.

bjtitus• 14 years ago

Seems much less readable and I wasn't particularly thrilled with the reasoning that it was "more modern" than the previous font. Readability is more important to me in a news app than modern font choice.

Narretz• 14 years ago

I think I am not the first ine to suggest this, but if you have a company blog, put a small section at the top, where you a) state what your company is about and b) link to your main page. If my first contact with a company is through a blog, I always will want to check first what the company is about, to decide if I want to spend time reading. If you put barriers in my way during that step, I might not even bother at all.

janaboruta• 14 years ago

Hey, your point is right on. We'll be adding all that stuff shortly.

bradfordcross11• 14 years ago

Great point. It's always easy to assume context where there is none! :)

warseph• 14 years ago

It's a fine article, but the blog could use a bit of UX tweaking too. I have no idea what prismatic is, and the lack of a link to their homepage from their own blog seems like an obvious flaw, which i've seen really often in most website/startups blogs.

bradfordcross11• 14 years ago

Another commenter pointed this out, it's a fair criticism and we'll make an update to the blog accordingly.

benbjohnson• 14 years ago

Looks great! The underlying service is fantastic so it's good to see the web UI updated. I'd be curious to see some of the other design options they looked at.

I have a few questions:

1. Why is the nav on the right? When I'm scrolling through articles I keep wishing the main content was more centered.

2. Did you guys look at doing a serif font for the header and a sans serif font for the summary? I feel like it would separate the two more.

bradfordcross11• 14 years ago

1. it may go away entirely soon or change dramatically. We largely agree with your sentiment. :)

2. Yes, the meta serif turns out to be as readable as it gets for body copy, it's just spectacular! We may later have a toggle so you can select this theme or an all sans serif option...

emcl2• 14 years ago

OT, Prismatic is impressive in the choice of articles it displays. So much so that i have noticed it's getting a bit creepy. On some days when i happen to open a lot of pages on a particular topic, Prismatic will start showing me related stories. So is it tracking histories? Do all such services track online usage?

bradfordcross11• 14 years ago

Prismatic learns from everything you do. We have implicit signals (when you recommend, share, shave, remove, or click), and explicit signals, when you follow topics, publishers, or people. We know more about your interests than anyone, and you can expect that to be more true over time. Fortunately, we are only partially evil, so we mostly use this information to make your life more interesting, and only occasionally, we will use it to troll your newsfeed! :-P

emcl2• 14 years ago

I'm OK with Prismatic using information from twitter and any activity on getprismatic, and but i would not share the rest of my browser usage. For instance there was this day when i was reading up on XML on the browser and opened a bunch of pages on it. Then i fire up getprismatic and lo and behold! i find XML tagged suggestion. That was spooky;)

michelleclsun• 14 years ago

Great! Big fan of Prismatic :) One thing I don't understand is that sometimes there's a dollar sign next to an article (eg one from Forbes.com). What does that mean?

bradfordcross11• 14 years ago

It means there is something you can buy. Click the link and you go to amazon and if you buy whatever the item is, we get an affiliate. this is early testing of the revenue model we're working on.

tpbrown• 14 years ago

Looks good. Thanks for bringing it up to date!

bradfordcross11• 14 years ago

for realz, the web needed so much love some of internally were not using it much due to utter shame!

melchebo3• 14 years ago

Try again with proper grammar?

amongayt• 14 years ago

Looks great!

bradfordcross11• 14 years ago

thanks!

bluepaper2• 14 years ago

I'd quite like to sign-up to this actually, I'm all for specific websites using my tastes to deliver to me what they think I'd like. Saying that, I'd like to sign up using my Google account, why must you be able to 'manage [my] contacts'. Is there a way to opt-out of that, or do I just have to sign up for a stealth account? A little off-topic, I do apologise.

bradfordcross11• 14 years ago

These perms are just to be able to use your address book so that we can autocomplete emails when you email share stories.

bluepaper2• 14 years ago

Okay, I'll trust you on this one! It's looking promising, Although I was a little stumped when it stuck me on a "We're learning your interests" page with no indication of...anything, really.

Also, maybe going to the 'landing' page when already logged in should re-direct me to my home page? It gave me the impression I hadn't logged in and got a little faffy.

Besides that,as I said, looking promising and I look forward to seeing what comes up over the next few days/weeks. Thank you!

brcrth• 14 years ago

So much better now. My only complain is that when you shrink your browser window you lose the interests section, which I visit all the time for specific news.

bradfordcross11• 14 years ago

We want to understand exactly what you mean. Can you please send a screenshot to feedback@getprismatic.com ?

IgorCarron• 14 years ago

from the outside it looks great. But still can't run in on Chrome/XP or on iOS4.

melchebo3• 14 years ago

The white space at the right could be used in better places. Now it only contains two icons.

Prismatic launches a full redesign and shares their awesome design process

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