Onboarding #16: ReadingPack
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
- The first name field gets the focus, so I can start signing up right away
- Short form is good
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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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