tl;dr
DEV is redesigning the home page. But we need your help and feedback. Also, hi!
Hello, again.
This is Paweł, I'm a part of the Product Design team, here at DEV. Lisa and I joined DEV recently.
So, what does the Design team at DEV actually do? Great question! To keep it short: we're trying to make DEV more usable, better-looking, and welcoming. We're also going to work on our design system — a bunch of tools and guidelines to make designing and building features much easier; it should also help us make things more consistent because… well:
The Home Page
One of our very first projects will be improving DEV's home page. There are several things we'd love to do here — some of them will be subtle changes and others more drastic and groundbreaking (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit).
Goals
We have one main problem to solve with the home page makeover: people struggle to find relevant content. They don't know where to look because the current home page is a bit overwhelming.
We need you!
Now, the most important part.
We don't want to sit in a closed room, moving pixels around and suddenly deploy changes that you may totally hate. We want to stay in touch with you through the entire process. We want to inform you of our ideas and progress. But most importantly, we want you, the DEV Community, to help us by providing feedback, words of wisdom, opinions, and your ideas... DEV is open source and we want to be as transparent as possible. That being said, can you let us know:
- What are some things about the home page that you dislike the most?
- What are some things about the home page that you like a lot?
- What did you wish the home page did more of?
Thank you so much for your help. We’re going to take your feedback and make DEV a better place for us all! ❤️ Expect another follow-up post soon with more details about Home Page work.
Top comments (52)
I agree with all your suggestions, especially the last one!
I have a huuuuuge reading list, and almost always forget about it
I like these ideas alot!
Oh your first point is awesome. With this done it enables removing notifications everytime an article is published from the notification center!
The image of all our buttons really says a lot 😅
Hey, I've got more examples like this :d
Can't wait to see more of them!
If I have already read a post, why see it again in my "timeline"?
One thing I don't like: clicking my face makes the world go dark. I'm not sure why, but it's a bit jarring. I do this at least once a day, expecting that my click will take me to my profile or dashboard or something related to me, but all it does is turn out the lights. 🤪
Hey Pawel, first of all, in my humble opinion, I believe that it is better asking for things that "work or don't work". I strongly believe that asking and using
likeordislikein the same sentence tend to follow with not very good feedback. I'm one of those designers against the word "like", sorry!That being said, @jess hit the spot. Nevertheless, I don't see it as a major problem. The main question that comes to mind is why so many different kinds of buttons and are they all necessary?
Explaining with words is going to be difficult, so I made this pretty fast, bare with me, I did it really quickly! but you can have an idea about it.
Maybe using collapsed components, with a little bigger box and bigger typography can help unclutter the UI and help navigation. It's the first idea that came to mind. (Also aligned my profile card with the first post, that way the empty space left and right helps that center nav with the feed and days of weeks, etc);
Hope it helps, and again, sorry for the quick dirty mock ;)
(Edit: Uploaded a less shameful mock, but forgot to include the sponsors on it, but I swear they were there! 😅).
(EDIT 2: As others pointed out, the eclectic "style" of DEV it's part of its brand, and I really love it! I'm sure you guys will do a great job with the new redesign :D)
Yea, I tend to agree. Although feedback so far has been great soooo 🤷♂️
Your mockup is perfectly fine, thank you for spending time on it - visualizing ideas always helps.
The left sidebar now reminds me a bit desktop twitter - which I think is good. I like decluttering it and collapsing "my tags".
I have similar feeling about right sidebar but we also have to keep in mind that we want people to discover new content (not only for of sake of discoverability but simply engagement == money). So we definitely don't want to hide/collapse all sidebar content by default, but I think we have to do some juggling here anyway.
Totally agree Pawel, happy to be wrong!!
I have to admit, somehow the eclectic style of this site (and its buttons, haha) made it likeable.
It has something of "we don't focus on graphical shenanigans, we improve real UX!"
I think we certainly want to maintain the soul of the site, but it might be nice if new users could figure out how to find a podcast or browse listings. :P
We have podcasts here?!
dev.to/pod/
Mine is listed at dev.to/devpathfm :D
Yes, that's something I'm looking forward to :)
Totally agree, the "imperfect" UI and kinda "glitch" style is what makes DEV so unique (visually). We obviously don't want to kill that but at the same time I think we will want to find a right balance between style like this AND readability & usability.
The graphical shenanigans are part of the real UX ;-)
but because everything else seemed to click we have stayed !!!
Totally agree about liking the eclectic style,but for me I like it because it gives the place a "made by hands" feel to it.
I really love that y'all are asking the community for their opinions. We definitely won't all agree on the design of the homepage, but it's amazing that y'all include us. ❤️ Anyways, here is my input:
I like...
I've noticed inconsistencies with...
I hope this helps even just a tiny bit!!
That's very helpful, thanks!
And yes, with this post we wanna establish some sort of a communication channel with the community, not only for this project but for future ones as well. And you're 100% right we will not always agree on everything - sometimes we will have to make some calls that some people won't like. I think it's important to understand that we won't consider the community to be our "client" that we will be working for BUT more a team member that can give us some good feedback and ideas.
As designers we will have to filter signal from noise which is not very easy thing to do. On one hand we would love to please everyone but on the other hand it's simply not possible because "community" is not a one person.
HomePage show articles of tags and authors that I follow.
Have a page "Explore" where we can see all posts and all tags
Ooooo! "Explore" is a neat idea! Oh wait, isn't that what Popular (you know, week | month | year | infinity tabs) does right now?
join all these 4 tabs in "Explore", with week | month | year | infinity as a filter, plus as someone mentioned here, make a something to see all the tags, I think you can do it everything together inside "Explore" tab/page.
I believe will make the homepage Cleaner, on the other side will make the user to make 2 clicks to see, for example, the week posts
While I found the idea interesting of the "Explore" option, I'd caution against it.
Whilst it would make the homepage more clean it might cause an annoyance of the user friendliness, since two clicks might not seem such a hurdle in the beginning, it may become just that long term.
And it might just become cluttered up inside of that drop-down which might make the design deviate from the feel of the website.
Overall, I really like the feed to-the latest bar on the homepage. But to offer an alternative view of this.
Couldn't you guys add a "My Tags" option below the "Settings" in the drop-down that is in the top right corner where the profile pic is. Here's a little demo that might be what it can look like when you click the "My Tags" button.
The green marker indicating the chosen tag and those that haven't a green marker are off the feed.
Love that idea!
Another thing, I like to scroll until I find some articles that I like, you know that people who scroll and scroll on instagram? Thats me on Dev.
Will be nice if I already see an article to make them disappear on homepage but easily reachable if I want to read them again. I don't know the best solution for this but what I mean is if I scroll for 2 minutes and then refresh the page, I need to scroll everything again to see new articles and that makes me leave the page and wait until new articles appear on top of my feed again
Thanks for this feedback! Curious, have you used the "Save" feature to save articles you are interested in and want to return to later?
yes sure :)
What I mean is If I already read the article probably I don't want to read them again and I don't want them to appear on my feed
May be just add ”Day” as well to it and that will be explore, while home page shows content from people you follow and tags
I wish the homepage would default to showing me a feed of My Tags, as opposed to everything. I think that's my only ask.
I like that #help is visible on the sidebar.
I feel like the key links section is buried and could possibly be combined with the profile / hamburger menu.
In my case, I often find myself looking for that page that lists all the dev.to formatting tags. It is under FAQ? It is, but I wouldn't expect it to be there. Maybe it's own content editor / how to guide link that is accessible from the home page.