Telescope before 1.6 release
The new User Interface is coming.
After reading about Jaguars and architecture, I end up thinking about how the design of things that surround us affect us.
I was working on fixing a bug on Telescope’s front-end related to our component ‘ScrollToTop,’ and I thought it was a good time to improve the UI while facing the screen. We will be launching version 2.0 in a month, and I believe that is the perfect occasion to introduce our users to a new UI.
So I started digging the web for references and inspiration that could help me to start the new front-end design. After the first sketches that didn’t work so well, I found out that Telescope is a place to read blog posts, it may sound like an obvious thing, but it is not obvious for everyone.
When I thought about Telescope two weeks ago, the first thought that I had was, “Telescope is a platform to learn how to code, and see the code that we write happening.” That was how I used to think about the project because I’m not particularly eager to read blog posts on Telescope; when I see an interesting post, I always go to the author’s blog platform because our UX it’s not as good as the other blogs platforms. But I never thought about this experience, where Telescope was a place that redirects users to other blog platforms, not because of its contents, but because of the UI/UX. And I know that this is the opposite behaviour that we want.
Then I decided to look to Telescope as a user, not as a developer. Trying to understand my own experience using Telescope. As a user, I experienced Telescope in two different scenarios, the first one a scenario where I had a short time to read as most as I can read. The idea is to emulate a person who has many things to do and needs to read the Telescope blog posts. Well, since you don’t have the amount of time to click in each post to open a new tab to read it on the author’s blog platform, you end up staying scrolling in Telescope.
But there is a big important point here since most Telescope users are students or professionals from computer science. We are used to reading software documentation delivered almost every time without any UI/UX concerns. And I always complain about it. So we are more susceptible to accept a 100% not friendly UI.
In the second scenario, testing Telescope I was emulating a user who has plenty of time to read, and in this scenario, the result was that I was going to the author’s blog platform to read the post.
So if we want to be a better place to read, we need a new UI that targets a better UX., And I believe that a new UI/UX will have excellent consequences; we will have a product that looks better, we will have a user-friendly interface, we will be the place to read the posts that we write, and maybe our dedication to writing posts even get better because of it.
