Product? ReadingPack

What does it do? It is actually a bit similar to Instapaper and Pocket, but with a social twist. You can share your reading list with your followers.

Home page

ReadingPack home page

  • The first name field gets the focus, so I can start signing up right away
  • Short form is good

Follow people

Follow people

  • I’m directly at 40%: feels a bit off, because I didn’t do anything yet (except for entering my details)
  • It says that I have to follow at least 3 people, but I can skip this step
  • When hovering over “skip” I get a little tooltip that tells me it is okay to follow one person too: nice trick to motivate me to follow at least one person
  • Search does not seem to work: entering the string “music” resulted in an endless spinner
  • After like 10 seconds, results finally appeared, but I could not get rid of the search suggestions afterwards
  • Hovering over the “Follow” button shows a tooltip which tells my their recommendations will be added to my feed

Bar with button

  • After following one person, the progressbar did not move forward, but a huge bar with a single appeared at the bottom: “Awesome! Let’s see your reading feed”
  • Received a welcome e-mail with links to their native apps, a browser extension and IFTTT channel

Recommend my first article

Recommend my first article

  • Jumped from 40% to 80%: that’s what I call progress!
  • Again tooltips on hover. I hope their gone when using the rest of the product for real
  • I have to open an article and recommend it, so there I go

Reading an article

Read and recommend an article

  • Loading an article took fairly long, hope that it not usual
  • They support Speed Reading with Spritz, nice
  • More tooltips
  • Recommend button always visible

My reading feed

My reading feed

  • All shared articles seem to appear here
  • I got a bar to share this page with my friends, but it disappears on scroll and will just appear and disappear on scroll, can’t click it which is sad
  • I like the immediate feedback form which is at the bottom of the page
  • Again more tooltips
  • Reading seems to be really slow. The rest of the experience on the site is ok (it is no way as clean and polished as Instapaper though)
  • I can only read articles that I have added to ‘My pack’. I get this from a platform perspective, but it won’t get me hooked because I just want to read and decide later if I need to add it to my page or pack