For the last few months, I have been working on Artemis, my calm web reader. Artemis lets you keep up to date with web feeds. The reader updates once per day, intended to discourage me from periodically checking for new articles.
As I have been working on the tool, I find myself often noting details about my experience that I think could be better – opportunities for refinement.
Today, for example, I noticed that my email inbox has an indicator that tells me when the inbox was last refreshed. This made me think of some friction I have ran into when using Artemis: I don’t know whether the reader has updated successfully because the update cadence is long – daily – and there is no status indicator that tells me that feeds were read. Thus, there is no way to differentiate between whether no articles were published since the last update or whether something went wrong during the update.
This has inspired me to think about how I can add a “last updated” indicator to the reader. The indicator will be small. I want the information to be present in the user’s reader, but not to stand out too much. I will likely design the indicator to appear at the top of the reader so it is easy to find and so that it is placed where it is needed.
Many changes to Artemis have not been huge new features, rather refinements to what already exists: adding more spacing between text, making product screenshots appear in dark mode if the user is viewing the page with a dark mode preference, keeping the features list up to date, adding support to see author names in your reader instead of domain names, making the site refresh all pages when a user logs out so the logout state is consistent across tabs.
I am starting to become more attuned to when things don’t work the way I expect them to. This inspires me to both think about what is causing friction, how I can improve the design, and how others solve the same problem. For instance, the in-app links in the mobile version are at the top of the screen, which means you have to stretch your thumb quite a bit to navigate between pages. Now I’m thinking could the links be at the bottom? Or could there be a side menu that triggers with a swipe and has links at the bottom?
As I work more on the project, I realise that improving Artemis is just as meaningful as starting work on a new thing. There is still so much for me to learn; there are many areas in which the service could improve. I am excited about the process of refinement; of improving what already exists, day by day – of making the tiny changes that make the application more delightful.
