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August 12, 2024

The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #178

The soft launch of our newest monthly template, considering a newsletter platform change, and comic reading!

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#178 | 12 August 2024

Calendar Template Success


Remember my woes from last time? Well, woes begone! 😌
My July 2024 StoryGraph Reading Calendar. It shows different coloured lines to represent on which days I read each book. There's a book cover on the day I finished the book. Bottom right of each day cell, there's a book icon with the number of pages read on that day alongside. Beside one day is a trophy icon to signify most pages read in a day that month. Underneath the calendar is a key of all the book covers read during that month and their respective colours and ratings if finished and reviewed.
StoryGraph users can access all of their wrap-up graphics from any month's stats page!
This is probably the most fiddly feature I've ever worked on! 😅

There were several hours of tweaking shapes, sizes, and positions by pixels here and there, trying to account for every type of user, from those that finish multiple books a day, to those that only mark read dates. I wanted everyone to have a pretty visual to look at.
Abbie's March 2024 Reading Calendar, in a similar structure to the prior image, except there are different colours and covers. Abbie also has a headphone icon in each day cell, with a number alongside representing the minutes listened to that day. Her trophy icon recognises the day with most pages read and minutes listened to combined.
And it looks like I've mostly succeeded! Though, I have received a handful of messages from people who think I didn't account for their style of tracking or that there's a bug in the design.

It's been an interesting exercise this past week between balancing confidence in my design choices (especially knowing all of the variations I've experimented with), distinguishing between real user pain points and inevitable differences of opinion, wanting to make as many people as possible happy, and deciding how much more time it's worth still spending on making tweaks when the vast majority of users are delighted.

Midway through August, and being a couple months behind the roadmap for this year, I've got to move on to several other started but unfinished streams of work. I'll save further tweaking of this design and others for V2!

What's been especially rewarding about the calendar (soft) launch (it's not been officially announced yet) is hearing from users who say the product has literally given them back time in their day:
@casselwrites's July 2024 reading calendar. Top right she has superimposed the comment: "@thestorygraph, thank you for always innovating and delighting your users!!! This feature saves me so much time/emotional energy. I tried to do this in Canva and never could get it to look right. Now, here it is, pefectly generated for me in your app! 😍"
🥰🥰🥰

Another Newsletter Platform?


I've been using Mailchimp since this started in 2019, but based on its cost and limited functionality, I think it's time to move somewhere else. 🤔

Do you have any recommendations?

The current front-runner is Substack because it's free no matter how many subscribers I have, I can easily migrate from Mailchimp, and it enables me to introduce a paid supporter tier and potentially future exclusive paid content. 👀

Don't worry — this newsletter as it stands will always be completely free!
 

What I'm reading


I've been enjoying reading another piece of Brian K. Vaughan's work! I really like Paper Girls but it's got nothing on Saga! 
StoryGraph Book pane for Paper Girls: The Complete Story. The book cover to the left is blue, representing a sky, with the cover in large white writing up top, and four girls lined up almost side-by-side underneath. In the middle is all of the book information: title, author, 800 pages, first pub 2021, and all the tags: fiction, comics, fantasy, lgbtqia+, science fiction, young adult, adventurous, mysterious, medium-paced, and my custom tag: 'august-tbr'. On the right is my reading status information: a progress bar filled up 78%, "Started Aug 7 2024", 'currently reading', and the book is marked as 'owned'.

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. Know somebody who's an avid reader or would enjoy following along with this journey? Please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)
 
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