Notebook.ai

Focused feedback: your Home/Dashboard page

@andrew flash_onAdmin Admin forum 16 comments schedule
flash_on
@andrew flash_onAdmin
verified_user Mod Admin

Hi all!

I'm working on a large rework of much of Notebook.ai's interface. With these improvements, I hope to accomplish a few simple (but complex) goals:

  1. Make the site work fluidly on phones, tablets, and other smaller screens
  2. Give the site a lot more design breathing room for new features

To that end, I'm also looking at improving your dashboard (what you get when you click "Home" in the sidebar), but I want to hear from everyone about what specifically you like and dislike with the current functionality and design, and what you'd like to see changed/improved on that page. I'm open to all sorts of suggestions/critique/feedback!

The biggest goal I've had in the past for the page (and would love to improve upon) is to give some kind of home screen for worldbuilders to quickly jump into making small (or large) improvements to whatever world they want to work on. Whether that's via writing prompts (as we have currently), or suggesting pages to create, or offering a place to review on existing pages, or what – I'd love to hear what you guys want to use and/or see in your dashboard.

@Shuri-the-Floof-Doggo

Thank you. This all looks good. No complaints.

pets
@Riorlyne pets

To be honest I don’t really use the dashboard all that much, unless I’m on my phone (and then it’s probably not optimised for how I would best use it) - when I’m on desktop or tablet I navigate to all my worldbuilding elements via the sidebar (side note that I love the sidebar).

I think that it would be great if we could customise worldbuilding prompts a little bit, maybe like a ‘turn prompts on/off for this page’ switch we could flick when creating a new page, or even a ‘turn prompts on/off for this field’ when editing templates (or both options!). I have, for example, countries that I need/want to fill in a lot more detail for, but also countries that don’t feature very much in my story and I merely created the page so as to have a link to a character’s birthplace and maybe a few notes on what food grows there. I would use the worldbuilding prompt at the top of the homepage a lot more if it was related to one of my major pages.

Other things:

  • I like that gallery images are used for the sample page images (it gives it a more personal feel) but not that they’re weirdly squished to fit the space. Seeing my characters all turned into flat hobbits is a bit unnerving!
  • Mobile (portrait mode where the sidebar doesn’t show (particularly on iOS)) needs a link to the Documents
  • On mobile, it would be nice if the page type links were smaller, maybe working like an accordion so we could still select a character. Especially with premium pages enabled, it’s a lot of scrolling to get to things later on in the alphabet like Magic!

  • Not homepage specific, but on my phone the header bar is so crowded that there isn’t enough room for all the icons as well as the ‘Notebook.ai’ link to the homepage. I often hit search or help when I mean to go to the homepage. I can send through a screenshot if it would be helpful.

  • Other users have mentioned this, but if (and I’m aware this is a big if) a commenting feature is added to pages (where other users can post feedback directly) it could be useful to have a ‘recent suggestions’ widget on the home page, where one could see things like, “I really love Cassandra’s design!” or “I think you should add why Cassandra finds it difficult to trust her friends”.

  • It might also be handy to have a “Create new page” at the top which lets users select page type (from those available to them) and universe (If limit content to universe is not active) and type in a name, thus quickly and easily creating a page if the idea strikes and time is limited. A confirmation pop up/banner (Character created!) could include an edit link if users want to add more than just the barebones of information.
@Yamatsu

Honestly, I really would like just a night mode so I'm not blinded every time I want to get some late-night writing in. In terms of actual customization, I think it would be nice to have a little cosmetic feature where we could individually change our bars and background colors, just so I'm not staring at white and blue constantly (though it's great for colorblind users!). To expand on what Riorlyne said, I think it'd be cool to have a Google Docs-type suggestion creator where people could go to pages where the links were provided and make suggestions or critique, and when they're done you could dismiss the suggestion note.

I like the documents feature, but I do not like when you click on it and it just comes up with a small little scrolly section. I’d rather it open like a google doc or something so I can just view it without being in an edit mode. I’d love it if there was a way to change the stockpicutres for each main category (ei ‘characters’ or ‘universes’) just to spice things up. It would also be helpful if charcters could be sorted based on their universe, maybe in addition to seeing all of them at once, just so I can, for example, go to Universe 1 and see that character 1 and 2 are from there, and Universe 2 has character 3 and 4 (like a drop down menu) and all my characters are in ‘characters’ or something so I can see how many total I have. That’s all I have to say.

@kat_i_am

I think it would be fantastic if on a person's page, they could have a little box talking about their projects they're working on at the moment, and then what they need help on. That way, if a user is interested in another user's project, they can track the project and add suggestions there, instead of the first user having to make lots of threads for their project. A real-life example of this is my Alice in Wonderland novel. I know I have a few people who consistently comment on my threads asking for it (Turtle of Freedom and Jynnie are two people I remember off the top of my head). I know they're interested in this project, and it would be great if there was a centralized place on my page for the project where I could get feedback from people who are invested in my idea. And I have people of my own who have had super interesting projects, but I lose track of them.
So a way for people to concentrate their threads for a project
Maybe even just hashtags? So I could tag all my nano projects #AllHailTheQueenOfHearts (the title), and then people can just remember hashtags

@ninja_violinist

I agree with most of what's been said so far! Thanks for all you do and for asking us for our input!
Something that I'd find cool is some way to temporarily mute/hide forum notifications, because I have the attention span of a peanut and I get really flustered when I'm working on something in my worldbuilding and I suddenly get a notification that someone posted in a thread I created five months ago
I guess you could call it something like a "focus" mode where it's easier to ignore the rabbit hole that is the notebook.ai forums? So far the only way I know would be going into the forums to unsubscribe from notifications, but the problem with that is that it forces me to go into the forums and out of whatever I was doing

person_off
Deleted user

As much as I enjoy the gallery feature, it is pretty awkward whenever I open up a character's profile and see part of an image I uploaded that's all compressed. I'd really appreciate the ability to customize how the image looks when it shows up on the character profile, such as what part of the image I want to show and if I post multiple images, which ones show up.

person_off
Deleted user

Honestly this site is amazing, I love it and it is very helpful.
One thing I would change is the accessibility when I'm on my phone, and maybe the background color for when I'm working on stuff late at night. Also would it be possible to add a feature where you can change which Categories you have when you aren't premium? I love the detail that is there in everything, But I feel like there ore other pages that would be of more use to me than what I have. Honestly I would Prefer being able to use Species over Items any day, and while I do have a couple of items on there, I would give up the info there if it were possible to change it so I have the Species Pages.

group
@Starfast group

One thing I would change is the accessibility when I'm on my phone

Yeah I’d like to have this as well. A lot of times I have to type in the URL to get to the certain pages like the forums. It would be nice to have a better mobile layout.
Also I keep getting logged out on mobile? I’m not sure what the issue is there but I know i’m hitting the remember me button but I still get logged out every few weeks. Logging back in is usually a bit of a hassle because the only way I can log back in is to go to the home page, hit sign up, and then sign in.

@ravens

I have to do that as well…

@blue_topaz

These are all really great ideas I agree with them all
Maybe we could have a way to flag or star discussions? And you would have a ‘flagged discussions’ section next to the unread button where there’s a list of all the threads you flagged, so that way you won’t loose old threads or rps with lots of good writing in them after they die? Sort of like how Instagram has the ‘archive’ option

person_off
Deleted user

These are all really great ideas I agree with them all
Maybe we could have a way to flag or star discussions? And you would have a ‘flagged discussions’ section next to the unread button where there’s a list of all the threads you flagged, so that way you won’t loose old threads or rps with lots of good writing in them after they die? Sort of like how Instagram has the ‘archive’ option

That would be awesome!!

flash_on
@andrew flash_onAdmin
verified_user Mod Admin

Hey everyone, thanks a ton for the input. I'm getting closer to finalizing the new design, so I just wanted to itemize and respond to a few comments here so y'all can know what to expect. :)

Done (in the new design, but not released yet):

  • The blue top bar is cleaned up and the sidebar can now be toggled on/off on mobile
  • Images are no longer weirdly squished on the dashboard
  • There's a discussions link on the dashboard
  • Viewing documents (instead of always just editing them)
  • More fields on profile pages (with more soon as well)

To be done (most likely after this update):

  • Turning prompts on/off for specific pages/fields
  • Commenting/suggestions on pages
  • Night mode theme

And, to clarify:

On mobile, it would be nice if the page type links were smaller, maybe working like an accordion so we could still select a character. Especially with premium pages enabled, it’s a lot of scrolling to get to things later on in the alphabet like Magic!

@Riorlyne When you're scrolling, do the cards expand into the scrollable lists, or do they stay as images? They're supposed to stay as images until you tap on them (to view the list) to make scrolling easier, but if that's not happening that's an issue!

Something that I'd find cool is some way to temporarily mute/hide forum notifications, because I have the attention span of a peanut and I get really flustered when I'm working on something in my worldbuilding and I suddenly get a notification that someone posted in a thread I created five months ago

@ninja_violinist I like the idea of a focus mode (and will probably do something like this soon), but this should be a bit better in that you will still have your notifications at the ready, but aren't immediately visible to you now unless you're on the forums or on your dashboard – so when you're worldbuilding, you can focus on worldbuilding, and then you're checking in on notifications, you can still check them quickly. Happy to iterate on this, but I think it'll help a bit. :)

@ninja_violinist

This is super helpful! Thank you so much for asking us for our input!

pets
@Riorlyne pets

@andrew (Our Supreme Lord and Overseer) - Thank you for this preview! It’s exciting to see what’s in the works, and thank you so much for taking our suggestions into account. :D

On mobile, the cards do stay as images while I’m scrolling unless I click on them, but as it’s one image per screen it does take a while to scroll through 20 screens to get to ‘Traditions’, for example.