“Ok, who’s the person that needs to be e-mail bombed for not giving Kerry a raise while she slaves away her personal time?”
That would be Chris ;-)
To expand on Albionshores’ question on where Mixx is headed, how complete is the current Mixx user interface?
I ask because I worry that the current Mixx might come off as over-featured to newcomers while also risking being underfeatured for some power users. I don’t fall into either category but I thought it could be interesting to hear what each Mixx staff thinks of this issue and how user friendly Mixx is to them when they use it.
When we launched Mixx back in October, we had a vision for what we wanted to do with the site. We always think about Mixx as being a combination of 3 general things: A personalized Start Page experience (aka yourMixx), a vote-based mechanism of content sharing (Mixx as a news site with categories and story promotion based on votes), and finally a social network that allows you to find and connect with users of like interests (friending, profiles, groups, comments, etc).
In the last 10 months, we have been able to bring each of those 3 things to life by getting the basics done in each area. With features like Breaking News, Related Items, Favorites, etc, we were able to solve some of the fundamental problems we saw with social Media sites currently available. We launched groups: first private only, then public, then fully customizable. In other words, we put it out in its nascent form and then slowly improved upon it. Comments: we put it out in its first form, then came back and improved upon it.
Looking forward at our roadmap, our "short term" meaning through the end of the year roadmap is revisiting areas that we have already launched and re-doing them for simplicity and improvement. Hindsight is always 20/20 and there are so many things we wish we could have done differently. Now is our chance.
That being said, improvement often is a new feature or two. And the more features you have, the more complicated the interface can be. We try to counter-balance that by using outsiders to evaluate our experience and learn from the n00b experience.
I often come off as vague though so here are more specific questions based on this:
Honey, does the house still look like it’s under construction to you?
I'm personally not bothered by this and Mixx is stable enough for everyday use but at the same time, I wonder whether a new user who’s been pampered by the simplicity of pre-jumping the shark Digg or early Reddit would not only be overwhelmed by all of Mixx’s features but get turned off by how messy it currently looks.
I'd certainly like to hear specifics on the areas you think are "messy" in their look. At times, we look a but cluttered, but "messy" can be a different thing.
Don’t get me wrong
. I love how Mixx is a trailblazer in features and I’ll be happy if they keep doing that.
However, I also wonder whether a user would get the sense that all this trailblazing is a sign of Mixx abandoning the previous features they worked on. Already there’s been a recent topic asking why their YourMixx page is getting slow. On first thought, this doesn’t appear to be a crucial issue and this is a well known problem. That is, until I realize Mixx Community is looking more and more like the solution rather than a new feature.
Nope, we're not abandoning things we've already launched. As I said above, we're actually going back and trying to fix and clean up things we wish we had differently on first launch. We did it with groups, we did it with comments. Next up is the story pages. You'll see some changes to those in another week or so, and then more in September.
Mixx Communities are most definitely NOT a replacement for YourMixx. In fact, YourMixx is next up to get an overhaul and facelift. The minimum of which is to speed it up. Would love, again, to hear suggestions you might have for YourMixx. We've got our ideas, but always like getting other perspectives.
If you think about it, Mixx Community’s crawler and ability to handle lots of tags without slowing down is far superior to the YourMixx page but alltogether different. This begs the question “Is YourMixx page being abandoned instead of being fixed”?
and let me repeat: No, YourMixx is NOT being abandoned. Quite the opposite.
That’s just one side of the question though. The other side is a subcategory on whether Mixx is coming off like a featuritis: “Is the Mixx Community actually taking away from the YourMixx page?”
Already if you browse some of the mixxingbowl topics, you’ll see users recommending Mixx Communities over YourMixx and while they are certainly entitled to their opinion, I just have to wonder whether these are subjective opinions or a subtle reaction towards saying YourMixx is becoming useless.
Even setting these aside, I wonder whether users don’t start to begin feeling like they are akin to being bombarded by ads because of the way Mixx Communities auto-insert themselves into each submission. I fear someone would at first be wowed at how many communities there are to check out only to be disappointed that all these communities have basically just crawled their submissions.
You are seeing less and less of this now, because we've already put in a fix to stop the rampant auto-crawling. Now, only items that reach a minimum plateau of popularity are added to communities.
That alone isn’t bad but if you take into consideration the potential of a community being abandoned and there’s no way to vote/rate the quality of the Community as a whole, then all of a sudden it can be like seeing each letters of the alphabet stamped on your submission page, all leading to nowhere. I admit that the end result has left me only pretty much participating in one community (MMAFeed) and only because someone’s replied to a post I made there in the messageboards. At the same time, I usually don’t invest much time in forums/communities anyways so I was bound to be more of a lurker than a participant so I never suggested anything. I also fear that my suggestions could be worse or futile like being able to rate communities because if no one’s really interested in doing that, it may not help or even be abusable and deceptive like all those entries from social media sites with no communities. It doesn’t help that if you make a deadline for these Communities, it would only hurt some Communities which barely have entries that get submitted into Mixx.
If this doesn’t sound convulated enough, I also worry that the vague difference between groups and communities would only push new users away so I was also wondering where this was headed. Already I don’t think any moderate user of Mixx care for groups anymore and this is only made worse that groups are being sold as the simple to use and set up Mixx Community so I wonder what opinion any of the Mixx staff have to alleviating this problem. It also begs a similar themed question: “Are groups going the way of the dodos?”
There are still active groups, so not going the way of the dodo. Most groups that are out there are actually private groups, so you don't see them at all unless you are invited to them.
From the featuritis point of view, I could see someone thinking: “Why couldn’t they just make a Mixx Community crawler that’s as quick to set up as groups without all the customization and then just plain and simply tell us that that’s how we configure our YourMixx page instead of setting us up for the disappointment of our YourMixx page slowing down because we put in lots of tags in it?”...or not.
Performance will be one of the things addressed with the YourMixx redux, btw. We don't like slow things. NO offense to those of you who are slow ;-)
I’m really not the best candidate to judge how user simplicity should work but neither am I close to a representation of how power users would think but I could also see someone thinking “Well, bother!, why after all the illusion of being able to customize my Mixx Community’s look, color and theme am I not able to customize beyond that? I want to look at all the comments made on the page I’m viewing both from the Mixx Community I’m subscribed to as well as the default comments instead of a drop down arrow! I want to be able to not only crawl submissions but also message board posts so I can link all my little messageboard communities into one big one! I want more details, stats and summaries for each community so that I can figure out what the hell’s the difference between the Social Blend Mixx community and the Mixx Help Mixx Community! I want! I want! I want!”
It may sound like I’m suggesting something and I want to clarify that I’m not. I neither have the knowledge nor the proper frame of mind to even visualize that these are actually things that would drive away possible Mixx users or the trouble and time it requires to make such major changes. For ex. while I was listening to Chris’ interview, I was like "wasn’t Mixx around since the ice age?” so no major suggestions from me.
In fact, I’m sorry for making this more “wall of text” than it should be but I just want to make sure that in case my general question above couldn’t portray clearly what I wanted to ask or was too general, that a Mixx staff could pick from the more specific ones. I also want to clarify that this isn’t something I normally would send to someone so I never sent any version of this feedback to Mixx before because this was really just off of my head. I suddenly just found out that another Mixx staff was going to be on Social Blend so I tried remembering my previous question to a previous event (I’m not sure if it was also to Kerry or whether it was to Kori) only to remember that nested comments was what I wanted to suggest so my mind went on a fizzy and somehow I think I end up with this comment because of a possible blog article I wanted to write that was also convulated to begin with. (An article with the title “Is there room for traditional media in social media” which came from a failed attempt at trying to turn a Mixx suggestion about individual Communities possibly having the option to have Super Mixxers within them which came from a failed attempt to turn all forum posts into blog posts which came from me having just failed writing a guest blog post which came from me failing to properly set up a blog which made me think starting with guest blogging was a better start so yeah... I can be confusing, babbling and all that stuff so really if it reads like my question is about suggestions instead of the general question of how you {which at this point could be anyone} enjoy Mixx’s current user interface then that’s probably not it. It’s really just one question that have several annoying “too long didn’t read” babies.)
I did read the whole thing.
Web design is definitely an art, not a science. And one person's simplicity is another's confusion. There are very very popular sites out there that I just can not use. There are sites out there that I use every single day that I still struggle with the interface.
Its a balance, but the headline from this post is that we hear loud and clear: YourMixx is too slow, and we need to do something about it. Rest assured, we will.
-Kerry
