Prose Beta Update 3/22/21

Good afternoon Prosers,

Thank you all so much for helping us test out the new Prose Beta! If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, you’ll find it at beta.theprose.com.

Here are some updates we’ve made, based on your feedback.

Bug Fix: Blocked Users

Some folks noticed content appearing from users they had blocked/had blocked them. There was indeed a bug that has since been reconciled. You should no longer see any messages, notifications, or anything else from users you’ve blocked.

Navigation: Writing Desk

We received a number of questions about how to find your list of posts/challenges/books, including unpublished posts and books. The writing desk is still available on the new site, but it’s been condensed to a single page. That page is now accessible from the primary sidebar nav. We’re still iterating on the design of the writing desk, which is intended to be a one-stop-shop for editing and managing all the content you’ve created.

Design: Challenge Prompts

You can now hover over the challenge icon on a post to see the prompt.

Design: Sidebar

We’ve received feedback that the new navigation sidebar is too bold/distracting. We agree! We’re still iterating on the navigation design. One of our objectives with the redesign is to provide consistency of navigation across the site. The idea of the new sidebar navigation is to surface all the commonly explored areas of Prose in one place, which is only one or two clicks away, and have sorting take place in another. Currently, that means navigation on the left, sorting on the top. The current (old) site uses a topbar nav, which drastically limits the number of navigation items it can easily surface. For a site like Prose, which allows you to explore posts, challenges, books, portals, and authors, this is a tough constraint. If we were to return to a topbar nav, we’d either have to place all the commonly visited surfaces of Prose inside of a “hamburger” menu, or we’d have to surface all those areas via a single “Explore” page. For the time being, we’ve reduced the font size slightly and reduced its overall width.

Bug Fix: iPhone Zoom

iPhones were zooming inputs (like comment fields) when those inputs were in focus. This zoom caused other UI elements of the site to be zoomed as well. We’ve bumped up the default font size by 1px to avoid this zoom.

Bug Fix: Collapsing Comment Tags

Comment tags weren’t being properly collapsed to read ”@Me @You and X others”.

That’s what we’ve done so far, with much more to come. We are actively listening to your feedback, and want to incorporate as much of it as possible. Please continue to comment and share your feedback here. Don’t hesitate to email us at info@theprose.com. We read all our emails, but we can’t guarantee reading each and every post/comment made here on Prose.

Here are some of the things you’ve asked for.

Deleting Conversations

Currently, there’s no way to delete direct message conversations on the beta site. We know, it’ll be added soon.

Search

Search is missing on the new beta! Fear not, it’s coming.

Challenges Page

Challenges page is “unrelentingly white”. We agree, we’ll figure out how to add a splash of color.

Bug: Can’t Enter Challenges

We’ve heard challenges can’t be entered on the beta. We’ll investigate that ASAP.

See Yourself

Some folks want to be able to see themselves when browsing the popular authors page. We here you, we all have a bit of narcissist in us.

Dark Mode

We LOVE dark mode. It’ll make its way to Prose, eventually.

Too Twittery!

We’d be lying if we said we didn’t take any inspiration from Twitter, especially for the sidebar navigation. We’re constantly looking at other sites to see how they solve some of the same challenges we face. We definitely want Prose to retain its character and charm. As such, we’ll definitely be iterating on the design (especially the navigation) in the weeks to come. However, we believe the heart and soul of Prose is not its design, but rather, its authors. It’s all of you who breathe life onto our pages.

Timing and the Old Site

Just so we’re all on the same page, we’ll leave the new site in beta (accessible at its own url) for as long as it takes to iron out all the bugs and address your concerns/feedback. We estimate that’ll take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months. After that, we’ll make the new site the default site. But the old site will remain accessible at old.theprose.com for the foreseeable future. We can’t remove the old site until we’ve updated the iOS app as well. Spoiler alert: a new iOS app is on the horizon, as is a native Android app - hoorah!

We hope this provides some transparency as to what we’re currently working on, and plan to be working on. Please keep the feedback coming!

Happy writing.