

Ask HN: Your thoughts on these two interfaces? - NathanKP

I am working on creating an improved interface for my current web startup project. I am looking for opinions on which interface looks/behaves better:<p>The original interface:
http://bookflavor.com/<p>A potential improved interface:
http://bookflavor.com/test<p>Basically I am looking for a good way to deal with the varying sizes of the book covers. I like the seamless look of the alternate interface but I am afraid that it will be too crowded to easily scan.
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eiji
I like the project. Let me give you some background on how I handle books,
maybe it helps you with your work. I read around 800-1000 pages a month, spend
a lot of time searching for books to read next, and find it hard on amazon or
anywhere else to get good suggestions. I have to collect and manage a queue
myself so that I don't run out of material. I have two queues. One are actual
physical books at home (shipped three at a time for free shipping, 3-6 books
total). The other queue are bookmarks in my browser(3-10). So I can think
about the book for some time before a purchase. The bookmarks either point to
the amazon page, or wikipedia.

I would have some suggestions for your service so that it would benefit my
habits.

\- I like the /test layout with floating sizes better. It does look more like
crawling through a box for the next great book. However, I scrolled down maybe
6 pages and could have made 3 screenshots where the same book shows up twice
at the screen. This is bad. I don't want to see a book twice at one screen or
even after scrolling down for an hour. This would make me feel like I'm
wasting my time because I already ruled out a book by not clicking on it.

\- I want to bookmark a book-page, and the bookmark should stay alive. If I
come back a month later, it should still work.

\- On a single detail book page I would like to see the author as a link(not
dead text), which should take me to a page like the start page with all titles
of that author.

\- You seem to have amazon and goodread for user review. I always go to
wikipedia for the single book or the author. So I think you should have a link
to wikipedia too, if there is one. For a book detail page it should be the
wikipedia article for that book or the author. For an author summary page it
should be the author wikipedia page, if one exists.

HTH

~~~
NathanKP
Thanks for the great feedback. I'll look into the duplicate book cover bug. I
think it is probably caused by caches that were generated at different times.

At this point I do have permalinks on each book, but I can't be completely
sure that they will be permanent because I am still in serious development and
may have to dump the database and reimport, destroying the permalinks and
regenerating.

I too would like to make the author a link. It is high on my list of things to
implement.

I also want to include Wikipedia info on the detail page. I haven't yet found
a good way to scrape the info from Wikipedia but I'll add it to my list of
things to work on.

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daleharvey
I reckon both interfaces could do with a tad larger margin, possibly showing
the controls on hover?

the fixed row height one should center the book and have a neutral background,
I do think the alternate one looks cleaner, however if you expect people to do
something like rate / save a row of books then the positioning being
inconsistent will be annoying, if you only expect them to click through single
books then the seamless one gets my vote

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petervandijck
The first one (<http://bookflavor.com/>) is better. It's easier to scan. The
pictures in the second option are also too large.

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NathanKP
Clickable:

<http://bookflavor.com>

<http://bookflavor.com/test>

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fezzl
<http://bookflavor.com/test> = Twitter

