As mentioned here before, the del.icio.us team is presently in the midst of a major project: building a new platform which will speed up the site and help us grow even faster. At the same time we’re also taking a close look at our UI and exploring ways to make it both easier to use and more functional. Over the years we’ve heard a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. Many folks like the simple and terse nature of the site, while others take issue with certain elements of the design (shockingly, some of you think that light-blue-on-salmon-pink is not a good color combination; more shockingly, some of you think that it is). Our challenge then is to make del.icio.us better without messing up the stuff that already works.
We’ve been working on some new design ideas and recently conducted a series of usability tests to see if these ideas work. We brought in about a dozen people, both existing users and a few people who were new to del.icio.us. Yahoo! (our parent company) has some great facilities for this sort of thing which we basically moved into and hogged for about a week. It was a lot of fun for us (and, it seemed, for the participants), and we learned a lot from watching people use the site and try out our new designs. As we expected, we heard feedback all across the spectrum, and nearly all of it is proving deeply useful in our continuing work.
Here’s some stats from the tests:
- 20 participants
- Over 2000 post-it notes used
- 562 unique observations recorded
- Hundreds of design tweaks made as a result of feedback
- 62 cups of drip coffee and 23 lattes consumed
- Most disappointing thing overheard: “I don’t really get tags”
- Most gratifying thing overheard: “del.icio.us has totally changed my life”
- Funniest thing overheard: “I’m pleased; this new design doesn’t look like an angry fruit salad”
In the very near future we’re going to have a beta of the new design so we can get even more feedback (watch this space for announcements). Please also feel free to use this blog to share your thoughts about what you’d like to see different in del.icio.us. More cowbell? Less pink? Let us know.
Stephen Hood
Product Manager
Stephen Hood · stlhood
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Our friends over at Six Apart write:
If you have a TypePad blog, you can now make it easy for your readers to bookmark your stories on del.icio.us by automatically including a “save to del.icio.us” link in your post footers — without having to learn a single line of template code. Just sign into your account, navigate to your blog’s design tab, choose “Select Content” and configure your post footer.
In the past, we had a lot of questions from TypePad bloggers about how they could do this themselves, and instead of having them convert to Advanced Templates and copy and paste template code into their blogs, we wanted to save them the hassle and just do it as an option in the application.
If you’re using TypePad’s advanced template feature (and you know who you are), not to fear — del.icio.us has lots of options for adding your own savebuttons to your posts. Hint: you can use the template code that del.icio.us has for Movable Type, it will work just fine in your TypePad blog.
Michael Sippey
Six Apart
Joshua Schachter · joshua
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We’ve just launched our own official del.icio.us application for Facebook. It’s super easy to use; just visit our setup page, and after a few clicks you’ll be able add del.icio.us to your Facebook Profile page. The application lets you post a summary of your bookmarking activity to your Mini-Feed. It can also be configured to show your latest bookmarks so your friends can easily see what you’ve been reading.
Give it a shot and let us know what you think. We’re also working on additional functionality, so let us know what you’d like to see in future versions!
Nick Gerakines
Delicious Engineer
Nick Gerakines · snipersock
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Adobe Illustrator is one of my favorite design tools, and as part of the redesign of del.icio.us I’ve been using it in a number of interesting ways. For example, I’ve written JavaScript code to pull in and parse del.icio.us RSS feeds then automatically render my latest designs in Illustrator using real data. This allows us to rapidly iterate on the design well before anyone has to write any real code.
So I was very interested when the Adobe Illustrator team came to visit us a few months ago. It turns out that Illustrator users are constantly making excellent online descriptions of their tips, techniques, and tutorials, and Adobe wanted a good way to collect and share these with other users online and within Illustrator. So why not use del.icio.us?
Adobe’s first step was to set up a del.icio.us account and start collecting the best bookmarks on Illustrator they could find. They then integrated del.icio.us into Illustrator CS3 as part of their “knowhow” palette, thereby allowing users to tap directly into Adobe’s bookmarks.
To try it out within Illustrator CS3, select the “Window” menu then “Adobe Labs” > “knowhow”. From the “knowhow” panel you can see contextual help for the tool you are using and search the Internet for more help. You will then notice that one of the tabs has the del.icio.us logo on it, which points you to the bookmarks Adobe has collected. Alternatively, if you don’t have CS3, you can also try out the “knowhow” palette on Adobe Labs or http://knowhow.adobe.com or of course you can always see all their bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/knowhow.
If you have found or have created any Web pages that you think other Illustrator users would find useful, simply tag them “for:knowhow” and the Adobe team will review and add them to their collection for all Illustrator users to enjoy.
Bernard Kerr · theteam
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Delicious is looking for a skilled C++ developer of exceptional ability to join us in Santa Clara, CA and help shape the next version of our website. If you are fluent in C++, enjoy solving difficult puzzles and welcome the chance to work on a large distributed system that millions of users use everyday, I want to hear from you.
Abe Taha, Engineering Manager
Delicious Backend Team
Abe Taha · abetaha
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For the past few months, we’ve been working on a new del.icio.us Bookmarks extension for Firefox. We quietly released it to the addons.mozilla.org community to see what would happen, and we’ve been constantly working on it to make it great for our core community of users. Since that launch, we’ve received loads of great feedback and have been working non stop to address the biggest requests from the community.
After months of hard work, I’m pleased to officially announce the new extension. It has the same two buttons as the old one, but they do so much more. The biggest change is that we now integrate all your bookmarks right in the browser. From the new sidebar you can sort and search your bookmarks instantly, view tag intersections, and even modify your bookmarks. The new toolbar is also great - you can select what tags you want to see in your toolbar, show all the bookmarks with a given tag, and even view your bundles. Of course, livemarks and keywords are both fully supported.
If you still love the classic extension, not to worry, it’s still around. Otherwise, visit our help page to learn more about the extension or just go ahead and install it! Feedback is always welcome, so come on down to our group to talk about the extension some more.
Nick Nguyen,
Product Manager
Nick Nguyen · osunick
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As mentioned recently in this blog, we’re working on a lot of improvements for del.icio.us. We’ve just posted a survey as a way to get feedback and opinions from you, the users. We want to make sure that we’re focusing on the right things, fixing what’s busted and not busting the stuff that already works. It’s not very long as surveys go, and hopefully it’s not too über-corporate. Thanks for taking the time to tell us what you think. We’ll be posting a summary of the results a few weeks after the survey closes.
Stephen Hood · stlhood
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We passed our two millionth user signup at the beginning of this month. Because we’ve been very busy keeping up with the load, we didn’t have time to come up with something up to our normally high standard of wit (I was going to refer to server smoke but it seems I did that last time) so here is a cat picture I found on the internet.
Joshua Schachter · joshua
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Did you know that well over half of the requests seen by del.icio.us are for RSS feeds? That means that people cruising around our site in browsers are actually in the minority, when it comes down to raw traffic. Instead, our heaviest hitters include personalized home pages, desktop news aggregators, and even stranger things.
With that in mind, it makes sense to remember that small changes can have a big impact. Thus, given that our feeds have been doing a decent job this far, they haven’t changed much from their austere beginnings.
Decent isn’t great, though. So, as the team’s semi-official (and published!) feed junkie, I’ve been working on some small improvements. I’ve been looking into how our feeds are used and how to better streamline and present our information in different contexts. These improvements include features like:
- including tag descriptions in feed titles and descriptions where available;
- offering the ability to save bookmarks straight from your feed reader;
- displaying an up-to-date count of saves, without making items appear new again in feed readers;
- building more useful feed content with links to people, tags, and more bookmark details;
- providing more metadata where it seems useful, or less where it appears redundant.
And, this is just the start. We’re rolling these changes out gradually, on a per-user-agent basis, and we’re planning for more. So, if you don’t see any improvements in your favorite feed reader yet—or if the changes haven’t quite hit their mark for you—be sure to contact us and let us know!
Les Orchard · deusx
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Sometimes one word just isn’t enough to know what a tag really means. For example, when I was working as an IT administrator for a non-profit agency, I was scrambling to find a free or low-cost tracking system I could use to manage their IT issues in a sane fashion. I went into research mode and bookmarked a lot of sites under my “issuetracking” tag. Now, looking back, I wish I could comment a little on that tag about what I found and what I ultimately decided to do… but how? Enter our latest feature: tag descriptions.
For any of your tags, you can now add a public title and description to appear at the top of the page. It may just be to remind yourself of what it is or to tell others more about it. To get started, just visit one of your tags and click “create description” (at the top). As always, we don’t presume to know exactly how you’ll use this or what about it will be most valuable to you, so we welcome your feedback and suggestions!
Josh Whiting · jwhiting
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