The Mobile+AI Lab is now 4,000 strong! It is an incredible learning opportunity for us. It feels great to see the community actively participate in the key design decisions.
The most popular feature request from the past 2 weeks is the ability to swipe between open articles.
John took some time this week to enable swiping in the Lab app. Now, when you have an article open, you can swipe to the previous or next article without having to go back to the list.
We are also taking advantage of this build to add some other feature requests and bug fixes.
Questions for the community
Question 1 – What are the missing features or design frustrations preventing you from switching to the Lab app from the old Feedly app? Please let us know in the #general channel of the Lab Slack.
Question 2 – Do you use Feedly on an iPad? Did you join the new #ipad channel on Slack?
Here is the detailed changelog:
Fixed “Edit source settings freeze” Thank you Paul Adams and DCDawg
Fixed “Nav bar is clipped on iPhone SE iOS 12” Thank you curiouscamilo and Heals
Fixed “Long press to open mark-as-read options on iPhone 6”
The Mobile+AI Lab is now 4,000 strong! It is an incredible learning opportunity for us. It feels great to see the community actively participate in the key design decisions.
The most popular feature request from the past 2 weeks is the ability to swipe between open articles.
John took some time this week to enable swiping in the Lab app. Now, when you have an article open, you can swipe to the previous or next article without having to go back to the list.
We are also taking advantage of this build to add some other feature requests and bug fixes.
Questions for the community
Question 1 – What are the missing features or design frustrations preventing you from switching to the Lab app from the old Feedly app? Please let us know in the #general channel of the Lab Slack.
Question 2 – Do you use Feedly on an iPad? Did you join the new #ipad channel on Slack?
Here is the detailed changelog:
Fixed “Edit source settings freeze” Thank you Paul Adams and DCDawg
Fixed “Nav bar is clipped on iPhone SE iOS 12” Thank you curiouscamilo and Heals
Fixed “Long press to open mark-as-read options on iPhone 6”
We love the Web because it is an open and distributed network that offers everyone the freedom and control to publish and follow what matters to them.
We also love the web because it has enabled a new generation of content creators (Ben Thompson, Bruce Schneier, Tina Eisenberg, Seth Godin, Maria Popova, etc.). Those independent thinkers continuously explore the edge of the known and share insightful and inspiring ideas with their communities.
Connecting people to the best sources for the topics that matter to them has been core to our mission since the very start of Feedly.
But discovery is a hard problem. The web is organic, a reflection of the global community’s changing needs and priorities. There are millions of sources across thousands of topics and we all have a different appetite when it comes to feeding our minds.
About twelve months ago, we created a machine learning team to see if the latest progress in deep learning and natural language processing could help us crack this nut.
Today, we are excited to give you a preview of the result of that work with the release of the new discovery experience in the Feedly Lab app (Experience 06).
Two thousand topics
The first discovery challenge is to create a taxonomy of topics.
You can think of Feedly as a rich graph of people, topics, and sources. To build the right taxonomy, we started with the raw data on all of Feedly’s sources. We had to create a model to clean, enrich, and organize that data into a hierarchy of topics. Learn more about the data science behind this.
The result is a rich, interconnected network of two thousand English topics. And it’s mapped well with how people expect to explore and read on the Web.
On the discovery homepage, we showcase thirty topics based on popular industries, trends, skills, or passions. You can access all of the topics in Feedly via the search box.
The fifty most interesting sources
The second discovery challenge is to find the fifty most interesting sources someone researching any topic might want to follow.
Ranking sources is hard because not all sources are equal. In tech as an example, you have mainstream publications like The Verge or TechCrunch, expert voices like Ben Thompson, and lots of B-list noisy sources which don’t add much value.
In addition, for niche topics like virtual reality, some sources are specific to VR while others cover a range of related topics.
To solve this challenge, we created a model which looks at sources through three different lenses:
follower count
relevance (how focused is the source on the given topic)
engagement (a proxy for quality and attention)
The outcome is new search result cards. You can explore the fifty most interesting sources for a given topic and sort them using the lens that is most important to you.
Neighborhoods
One of the benefits of the new topic model is that the 2,000 topics are organized in a hierarchy. This makes it easy for you to zoom in or out and explore many different neighborhoods of the Web.
For example, from the cybersecurity topic, you can jump to a list of related topics that let you dig deeper into malware, forensics, or privacy.
One more thing…
We have done a lot of research over the last four years to understand how people discover new sources. One insight we learned is that people often co-read certain sources. For example, if you are interested in art, design, and pop culture and you follow Fubiz, there is a high chance that you also follow Designboom.
With that in mind, we spent some time creating a model that learns what sources are often co-read. The idea is that a user could enter a source that they love and discover another source they could pair it with.
You can learn more about the machine learning model (we call it feed2vec) powering this experience through the article Paul published here.
As a user, you can access this feature by searching in the discover page for a source you love to read. The result will be a list of sources which are often co-read with that source.
Thank you!
I would like to thank Paul, Michelle, Mathieu, and Aymeric for the great research work they did to take this project from zero to one. People who have tried to tackle discovery know that it is a very hard challenge and the results of this project have been very impressive.
We would also like to thank the community for participating in the Battle of the Sources experiment. Your input was key in helping us learn how to model the source ranking. We are going to continue to invest in discovery and we look forward to continuing to collaborate with you.
We would also like to thank Dan Newman, Daron Brewood, Enrico, Joey, Lior, Paul Adams, Ryan Murphy, and Joseph Thornley from the Lab for reviewing an earlier version of this article.
Your turn
Pick a topic you are interested in or a source you love to read and try out the new discovery experience. We’d love to hear your feedback in the channel “06-discover” of the Lab Slack.
Question 1 – What topic or source did you search for?
Question 2 – Is there a topic you were looking for and you did not find?
Question 3 – Is the metadata about each source in the search result useful? Anything missing? Anything we could remove?
Question 4 – Did auto-completion work well for you?
Question 5 – Were you satisfied with the quality of the results?
Question 6 – Did the ranking seem intuitive?
Question 7 – Did the related topics seem relevant?
Question 8 – Is there a feature you would like to see add
We built the Feedly mobile application over the last five years by making one small change at a time. This steady, incremental process allowed us to focus on giving you the best desktop experience possible.
Now, we are launching a brand new mobile app with a new design. Building the app from scratch gives us the best technical foundation to create a mobile experience that really shines.
Given that redesigns are hard, we have opted for a more open, collaborative, and fun process. We call it the Mobile+AI Lab.
Here’s how it works: Every two weeks, we push out a new version of the beta app to the Lab community. We use Slack to collect feedback and ideas to integrate back into the beta for more testing.
We are so impressed with this new process that we are scaling the Lab to 4,000 early adopters from 400 currently.
So that we are all on the same page, here is a summary of the first five experiments and what we learned. We love your candid feedback. We know that the beta app is still very early and raw. You will not hurt our feelings. We see your concerns and frustrations as opportunities to improve.
Experiment 01 — New Smooth Scrolling
This is a big change from paged scrolling. We want to make sure that we learn so that smooth scrolling is superior in every way possible.
Question for the community: Do you prefer the new smooth scrolling or the old paged scrolling? If you prefer the old paged scrolling, please let us know why?
Experiment 02 — New Views
Maximizing screen space is really important for a lot of users, so we added a compact view option.
We built the Feedly mobile application over the last five years by making one small change at a time. This steady, incremental process allowed us to focus on giving you the best desktop experience possible.
Now, we are launching a brand new mobile app with a new design. Building the app from scratch gives us the best technical foundation to create a mobile experience that really shines.
Given that redesigns are hard, we have opted for a more open, collaborative, and fun process. We call it the Mobile+AI Lab.
Here’s how it works: Every two weeks, we push out a new version of the beta app to the Lab community. We use Slack to collect feedback and ideas to integrate back into the beta for more testing.
We are so impressed with this new process that we are scaling the Lab to 4,000 early adopters from 400 currently.
So that we are all on the same page, here is a summary of the first five experiments and what we learned. We love your candid feedback. We know that the beta app is still very early and raw. You will not hurt our feelings. We see your concerns and frustrations as opportunities to improve.
Experiment 01 — New Smooth Scrolling
This is a big change from paged scrolling. We want to make sure that we learn so that smooth scrolling is superior in every way possible.
Question for the community: Do you prefer the new smooth scrolling or the old paged scrolling? If you prefer the old paged scrolling, please let us know why?
Experiment 02 — New Views
Maximizing screen space is really important for a lot of users, so we added a compact view option.
This move to a more open and transparent process has been extremely rewarding: we are collecting great ideas and getting instant feedback on some of the bolder changes we are exploring. (See the detailed changelog below.)
We are also getting a lot of great bug reports. Thank you!
Our focus over the past 10 days was to address those bugs and polish the new experience (including scrolling, navigation, views, mark-as-read options, and night mode) so that we have a solid foundation to invite more people to the Lab and explore new ideas.
Three questions for the community:
Question 1: We did some night mode color tuning. Better? If not, can you please let us know 1/ if there is a specific part of the theme we need to refine, and 2/ what is your luminosity level?
Question 2: Are there other bugs you would like us to fix? Please post them in the “bugs” channel in Slack.
Question 3: Is there a missing feature which is not currently in the Trello roadmap that is preventing you from adopting the new app? Please post it in the “general” channel.
We love building the new Feedly in the open and look forward to the next 12 weeks!
Here is a more detailed changelog for this week’s bug hunt:
Scroll and tap to open conflict (via Jesse Flanagan, John, and Kireet)
Empty screen when loading an article after switching app (via Ryan)
Improve scrolling performance (via Chad Hudson and Cyril)
Double tap on selected bottom tab bar should scroll to the top (via Lior)
Contextual mark as read copy improvement (mark all as read versus mark current top articles as read)
Mark as read missing items (via Dan Newman)
Mark as read and refresh of the All section (via Eric L.)
Move to next feed and gray out articles after Mark all as read (via Serge Courrier)
Night mode: Improve the brightness/contrast of the mark-as-read notification (via Dan Newman)
Night mode: Better read vs unread distinction (via Lee Sprung)
Night mode: Article separators (via Daniel)
Read later tab is not selected (via Lior)
Toggle read later bug (via Lior)
Do not automatically mark-as-read articles that the user manually kept unread (via Gabe)
Auto-mark-as-read-on-scroll: improvements regarding marking-as-read the last articles on the page
Refresh automatically when the user launches the app after minutes (via sryo)
Speed up the close animation (Aaron M.)
Make compact view even more compact by inlining the source and date metadata
Mark-all-as-read button at the end of a list of articles
Second level left-to-right gesture to trigger the save to board action (via Eiselch)
Progress circle needs to be reset after changing sort or layout preference (via John)
Thank you for your time and participation.
If you aren’t yet part of the Lab and you would like to participate, you can join here.
This move to a more open and transparent process has been extremely rewarding: we are collecting great ideas and getting instant feedback on some of the bolder changes we are exploring. (See the detailed changelog below.)
We are also getting a lot of great bug reports. Thank you!
Our focus over the past 10 days was to address those bugs and polish the new experience (including scrolling, navigation, views, mark-as-read options, and night mode) so that we have a solid foundation to invite more people to the Lab and explore new ideas.
Three questions for the community:
Question 1: We did some night mode color tuning. Better? If not, can you please let us know 1/ if there is a specific part of the theme we need to refine, and 2/ what is your luminosity level?
Question 2: Are there other bugs you would like us to fix? Please post them in the “bugs” channel in Slack.
Question 3: Is there a missing feature which is not currently in the Trello roadmap that is preventing you from adopting the new app? Please post it in the “general” channel.
We love building the new Feedly in the open and look forward to the next 12 weeks!
Here is a more detailed changelog for this week’s bug hunt:
Scroll and tap to open conflict (via Jesse Flanagan, John, and Kireet)
Empty screen when loading an article after switching app (via Ryan)
Improve scrolling performance (via Chad Hudson and Cyril)
Double tap on selected bottom tab bar should scroll to the top (via Lior)
Contextual mark as read copy improvement (mark all as read versus mark current top articles as read)
Mark as read missing items (via Dan Newman)
Mark as read and refresh of the All section (via Eric L.)
Move to next feed and gray out articles after Mark all as read (via Serge Courrier)
Night mode: Improve the brightness/contrast of the mark-as-read notification (via Dan Newman)
Night mode: Better read vs unread distinction (via Lee Sprung)
Night mode: Article separators (via Daniel)
Read later tab is not selected (via Lior)
Toggle read later bug (via Lior)
Do not automatically mark-as-read articles that the user manually kept unread (via Gabe)
Auto-mark-as-read-on-scroll: improvements regarding marking-as-read the last articles on the page
Refresh automatically when the user launches the app after minutes (via sryo)
Speed up the close animation (Aaron M.)
Make compact view even more compact by inlining the source and date metadata
Mark-all-as-read button at the end of a list of articles
Second level left-to-right gesture to trigger the save to board action (via Eiselch)
Progress circle needs to be reset after changing sort or layout preference (via John)
Thank you for your time and participation.
If you aren’t yet part of the Lab and you would like to participate, you can join here.
Some of you really love to read Feedly at night, or you prefer to read in night mode all day. In Mobile+AI Lab Experiment 05, we have a new night mode theme that turns Feedly into a friendly low-light experience.
To turn on night mode, open the left navigation bar, scroll to the bottom, and tap on “night mode.”
Two questions for the community:
Question 1. For those of you who like the dark mode, does the contrast we offer in this first iteration align with what you expect?
Question 2. Did you see any theme-related bugs? Any parts we missed that are still displaying day mode when you have night mode selected?
Looking forward to seeing you on channel 05-night-mode of the Feedly Lab Slack.
Some of you really love to read Feedly at night, or you prefer to read in night mode all day. In Mobile+AI Lab Experiment 05, we have a new night mode theme that turns Feedly into a friendly low-light experience.
To turn on night mode, open the left navigation bar, scroll to the bottom, and tap on “night mode.”
Two questions for the community:
Question 1. For those of you who like the dark mode, does the contrast we offer in this first iteration align with what you expect?
Question 2. Did you see any theme-related bugs? Any parts we missed that are still displaying day mode when you have night mode selected?
Looking forward to seeing you on channel 05-night-mode of the Feedly Lab Slack.
We collected lots of great insights in the last four weeks on people’s mark-as-read workflows. In Experience 04, we are adding to the lab application five different ways to mark articles as read.
Option 1. Tap on the check button on the top right of the page to mark the content of the page a read
Option 2. Long press on an article and mark the items before or after that article as read
Option 3. Use the swipe from right to left to mark a specific article as read (extend the gesture and hide the article)
Option 4. If you have auto-mark as read on scroll configured on Feedly Web, that setting will now be honored in the Lab app and articles will get automatically marked as read as you scroll. You can configure auto-mark-as-read on-scroll in this preference section
Option 5. At the end of each source and feed, there is a button to let you mark the articles you reviewed as read (and jump to the next source of feed)
Finally, we fixed the swipe-to-close article bug (and added a symmetric gesture for people who prefer to swipe from the right)
Three questions for the community:
Question 1. Do the 2-level swipe left to “mark-as-read and hide” feel natural?
Question 2. Do these 5 mark as read options cover all your needs?
Question 3. What would be the top 1 or 2 features you would like to see added over the next 4 weeks for the Lab app to become your default reader?
We created the Feedly Lab to give a voice to the community and make our development process more collaborative and transparent. So far the conversations have been very rewarding and insightful. Thank you!
Looking forward to your input on this new experience on channel 04 of the Feedly Lab Slack.
