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How to Get Started on Digg and Filtering My News Recent
Digg has established a fantastic community who have spent years studying the Top News promotion algorithm and measuring the Digg effect. There are, however, many more users who show up on digg.com via search and via shared links who have never heard of Digging, let alone Top News promotions. Over time we have continued tweaking the new user experience, and today several pieces of work come together to improve onboarding further. When a user logs into Digg for the first time they are now taken directly to their My News Trending page, filled with the most active stories on Digg. Above the list of stories is a brief explanation of how to get started on Digg with links to our more comprehensive explanation on about.digg.com (We have also made a "Getting Started on Digg" video which will be included soon). All other components of onboarding have been moved into modules on the right column.
Before we explain how the recent onboarding changes fit together, let's take a moment to briefly remember the last year's evolution of the new Digger experience. Initially we asked users to go through a two page odyssey where they connected to social networks on one page, and could follow popular users on another. Although we encouraged users to follow existing Diggers, there was little explanation of how that would shape and improve their experience. Moving forward in time, a second iteration made the onboarding shorter by collapsing the two pages into a single page where a user could follow popular users, connect with social networks and also search for existing users on Digg to follow. Friction was reduced, but it still did little to teach a new Digger how to get started. As we continued discussing onboarding, three priorities emerged:
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1. 2. 3.
make the initial experience for a new Digger compelling, minimize actions for the new Digger to reach content, teach new Diggers how to use and enjoy Digg. Each of these priorities required a different approach, and now these pieces are finally fitting together. To increase quality in the initial experience we released My News Trending. My News Trending has a major feature which accounts for the improved experience: it is always full of stories. This means that even if you are a brand new user who hasn't followed a soul or Dugg a story, you will immediately find interesting and timely content. We developed a module framework for the right column which customizes modules by examining the current user and page. So rather than asking users to immediately pick people to follow and social networks to connect, those steps are spread out over multiple modules. Since only a few modules are ever shown on any given page, the onboarding is distributed over a longer time, reducing friction. Now users can take their time tuning their Digg experience, rather than attempting a huge setup and configuration the first time they create an account and log in. The third piece, educating new Diggers about Digg, we are addressing by improving our What is Digg? page, adding a brief explanation on first login, and the introduction video which we are still working on. Putting these pieces together, the new Digger experience has improved tremendously over the past year. We intend to continue improving this and welcome feedback on these latest changes. We'd love to hear your suggestions on other ways we can improve our onboarding! Filters for My News Recent
There is a lot of news out there, and it can be hard to find what you are personally interested in. Recently we launched My News Trending which takes an algorithmic approach to personalizing news, and now we are also adding several filtering options to My News Recent to support further slicing your news. These filters are visible after selecting the "Recent" sort in My News, and they make it possible to see your time ordered activity from Diggers you are following filtered for submissions, comments or Diggs. If you are looking for the latest discussions among your friends, try filtering by comments. If you're looking for your friends' latest blog post, try filtering by submissions. Are there other filters that would be useful to you? We're taking suggestions!
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Rediscovering Search When we rolled out the two-column design we made a number of changes to the header at the top of the page. One of the changes we received a lot of feedback on was that the header emphasized story submission and deemphasized search. We have made some changes to address the feedback. As a reminder, here is what the first version looked like.
We were not intending to deemphasize search, rather we ran out of room while trying to make it easier to submit stories from any page. We have updated the header to one which tries to strike a more even balance between submission and search.
What do you guys think? Let us know! Revamped Digg About Site The new Digg About site now puts our blog content front and center. The updated What is Digg? page gives a quick overview of what Digg is, and we have updated the sections forAdvertisers and Publishers as well! (Generally we'd throw in a screenshot here, but you're already reading this post on the updated About site, so we'll pass this time.) If there is any additional content we could add to the About site or you have other suggestions, please let us know.
