The new Gather is live! And I'm live for the next hour to talk about the changes we've made and to thank the thousands of you who helped us build the new site.
As I told you in my earlier article today, the new Gather.com release, named for the minimalist artist Carl Andre, was built by the Gather community. We talked with our most active members on the improve.gather.com forum (please join us if you would like to chat about future releases). We surveyed more than one thousand of you. We interviewed members. We interviewed non-Gatherers in our demographic to understand their initial impressions of Gather. We tested various versions of the release with these groups as well. And, finally, we did online testing with a number of you to make sure that key tasks on the site were easier to find and easier to complete.
If you haven't yet done so, please take a few minutes to explore the new site, then come back and join our discussion to talk about today's exciting step forward and our plans for the future.
Just as a reminder, to keep the conversation fresh:
1) For those members who may not be aware, you'll need to periodically refresh your screen to view new comments as they're added. This will allow you to keep up with the conversation as it occurs. Refresh your view by using the refresh button on your browser, or the F5 key on your keyboard, or through the Ctrl+R key (on Windows) or CMD+R (on Macintosh) key combination.
2) After you've posted a comment to the conversation, refresh your screen (see above comment). To prevent accidental double-posting of comments on Gather, two comments can't be added concurrently without a screen refresh between posts. This will ensure that you can more quickly chime in with your thoughts.
This is an exciting day for Gather.com and we are particularly grateful to all of you who are helping us build a better Gather experience, step-by-step.
Best regards,
Tom Gerace, founder and CEO
Gather.com
my site: tom.gather.com
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Comments: 89
I'm still exploring where things are. I can't find my new group invitations anymore, but I'm sure I'll find them...:)
But the new looks is crisp, clean and delicious!
I am finding it easier to find articles - I just go to Recent Articles. There are almost 600 published since midnight.
I'm wondering about thinning the border on the comment box, or perhaps changing it to green, as Annina suggested.
More color would be nice on the site.
Any chance of altering your software so that some of our icons are not lopped off?
I know of several others besdies poor Juliet Capulet here who has been transformed to Marie Antoinette.
I just looked. Great header! (And I notice Food hit 1600 members last night.) I need to come up with one for my group. I do like the headers.
I am glad you are finding articles more easily this morning. I have been having fun hitting refresh on the comments tab too, watching how quickly conversation happens on the site (...yes, I know what this says about my social life).
We are looking at the comment box color. Our design team is looking at alternatives and we expect to make a change to something more neutral (perhaps "Annina Green") soon.
Thanks for the catch on icons, too! What you are seeing is a bug (sorry!). There is a fix in QA now that we will deploy shortly.
The graphic is a 990X220 pixel image at 72 dpi. You can see these specs or load your own on the group settings page.
I recently spoke to folks who knew you from BeFree. (Don't worry, they only had good things to say).
How is Gather going to be different for you compared to other companies you've started before? I know it's a different business...but just curious. :)
P.P.S. Great photos of your place in Boston Magazine.
I used to have 20 pages of articles and now I have 12. I wasn't able to scroll through to see if all of them transferred.
Leah- I feel like I need to start with something like "I love all my children equally, of course!" And honestly, I had a superb experience at Be Free and have been enjoying the early days here at Gather tremendously.
There are a number of Be Freer's who have joined the Gather team (our Pittsburgh office has many former development and QA team members from Be Free). They are part of an exceptionally talented team that spans technology, marketing, finance, and member services that are one of our biggest assets here at Gather.
From a personal perspective, there are two big differences. First, at Be Free, my brother and I co-founded the company and then hired a CEO to help us grow and go public. That meant I had great mentors to teach me the ropes (and that I had very little start-up experience myself!).
Here at Gather, I have a chance to apply a lot of what I learned before and work together with many people I have respected most in my career. It is fun to go down the path a second time and have a better sense of what needs to be done, who will be great contributors to the team, and where we need to go on this journey.
Thanks for asking!
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the page doesn't refresh by itself in firefox. But I really like the idea.
I would love your thoughts on how you would want RSS to work for outbound, if you are willing to publish them as a piece to improve.gather.com!
I keep thinking the new job will let up just a bit and let me blog more! I'm a gatherholic in withdrawal, but how can I resist this shiny new Gather? :)
Thanks, Tom (and team)!
See you on Gather! :)
Will Gather's point allocation remain fixed or will it, as Gather continues to acquire new and higher paying advertisements, raise the point totals for member activity? Meaning, if Gather pays one point per comment written, will there come a time when Gather raises its payment to two? I'm sure the quantity of Gather members will have to come into consideration.
Thanks for the note! We are tracking a handful of performance issues this morning. A couple of pages (the My Gather page that you get right after log-in and some of the namespace pages) are performing slower than we would like. We expect to have a fix in place shortly.
I am sorry you are having trouble with the video. I will ask Ben to get in touch to give you a hand.
Also, the screen "refresh" time has been a serious issue for me today. Maybe this will be resolved with time, but I find myself frequently closing everything down in frustation. And we have a very fast dedicated (T2) line here at work. I can't even imagine how slow it must be for those with slower networks, or dial-up!
I love the new homepage. It seems like a great way to get some exposure for newer members and those who aren't necessarily as widely read. Will I still be able to access the "most popular" articles, as well?
Great questions! Our compensation algorithms will change over time. As we learn about the community over time, we will "tune" these algorithms to make them better match community contribution.
Note, however, that we don't pay "per comment" today or even "per article." Instead, we look at the popularity of each author's content with the community and the quality of their writing when determining compensation.
We already automatically allocate more revenue to our members as our revenue increases. As Gather's audience grows and as we become more effective at showing the right ads to the right people, we expect our top author incomes to grow as well.
the posting of comments still won't refresh the page. I think that many of the complaints you are getting are due to hard won knowledge from some of us on how to use the system as was.. BUT this stripped down look really doesn't seem any more intuitive than the the last.
As I said at the last of these, I really appreciate your doing live chats. And while I'm payig complements, I've had great experiences with all the Gather team members I've had occasion to interact with. Special kudos to Ben (who seems to work 24/7), Jim, and Jennifer.
Thanks for joining us! We are working on the orange lines (thanks for the quick feedback on that). The page-up, page-down, and arrow functionality is a bug that appears only on certain browsers. Thanks for identifying that one for us. We have a fix we are testing in QA now.
Btw, I don't mind the orange lines.
Group owners can feature content to help keep the best articles visible for a longer period of time. We encourage them to use this list to focus membership on a handful of relevant conversations.
Note that you can now go to a page to see all group articles in a list as well. This may help you to keep better track of past posts as well.
On screen refresh time, we are working on a couple of small performance issues. We expect to have resolution shortly. Thanks for your patience in the meantime.
I don't like having to hit Refresh every time I want to post, and I think the orange bubble is a bit much. Is there any way to tone it down a bit?
On the whole I don't mind the new design, it's just taking some getting used to. I DO like the ability to see "all recent posts", although it can be cumbersome with so much activity happening. I also think the larger font is a good idea.
I agree that an "edit" function would be nice. Sometimes I just want to fix a tiny typo, and it wastes time (and additional clicks) when you have to delete the entire comment and repost it. On the other hand, the last forum I used had NO editing capability whatsoever, so this is far superior!
Our CPC ads will get increasingly relevant over time. The system is still "learning" what ads to target in which places. As our algorithms learn (and we improve them), this targeting will get better. In addition, we have a growing group of advertisers, but need real diversity to allow fine targeting.
On the My Page customization: we plan to allow you to customize that page in a number of ways (both changing the current modules like you suggest as well as adding others or removing ones we selected to better meet your needs). Stay tuned for a future release.
I will make the comment anchor suggestion to our team. It makes good sense to me. Thanks!
DON'T EVER USE THOSE FLY OVER ADS that place themselves directly on top of the article you're trying to read!
You want a really ticked off community? That would do it.
I highly recommend adding a button at the top of Gather that would allow the user to increase/decrease the font size throughout the site. I think it's done using CSS. Everything is quite large to me today, but I think I'm in the minority. Congrats
Maintaining a good member experience is critical to our success. Fly-over and pop-under ads are not in our future!
Now it works it works it works!!!!
1) It was hard for less savvy people to navigate the site and find what they wanted. We wanted Gather to be accessible to as many people as possible.
2) This new site format serves as a platform for future releases. It lets us extend the technology more easily to include the features and functionality our most active members have requested (e.g. group search, more robust people search, showing all comments on your content in one place, easier image navigation).
Stay tuned. There's lots of exciting stuff on the way.
Because we can edit/delete our own posts, I'm guessing most folks would simply delete an accidental double post.
Overall, a great site -- I appreciate all the work you and your staff have done!
Also, don't forget to join author Daniel Coyle as he discusses his timely book, Lance Armstrong's War, at Ask the Author. Click here to take part!
I really like the new header and top navigation (although the DHTML menus combined with this new look would make for faster browsing), as well as the minimalist look of the site, except for the new comment boxes. I personally prefer the old ones.
Couple of other thoughts:
- it would be nice to be able to customize the left nav with items that are important to me, i.e. recent network comments, recent images, etc. rather than just have the option of seeing tags. Overall, I prefer the old left nav to this one, but customization would give everyone whatever is more important to them
- I personally prefer a smaller font size on websites. I think the size you have now is good as a baseline, but it would be nice to have the option to go 1 size smaller.
- I have my screen set to 1024 by 768 and I still get the horizontal scroll bar on a lot of pages (including this article), but not all.
- Also, as far as the 1024x78 issue, I personally keep my IM window on the right side at all times, so with that, I can't see the full screen even at 1024. I'm not sure how many people have this same issue, but I tend to think that smaller minimum width that sizes up is better.
- There is quite a bit of white space at the top when there is no ad running - maybe that can be used for promoting member content and/or groups when there is no ad being served.
- As far as the homepage, I prefer the old one, but I believe the new one has the opportunity to cater to new visitors better, while the old one was more targeted towards existing members. I do think that the new homepage needs more content, as it seems very limited now. There's just not much to see there.
- I also like the new My Gather page, but like others, would like the ability to customize the elements that appear there.
I have to say, as someone that designs websites and does web usability, it's been very very interesting to read the variety of reactions to the significant changes you have made to the site. It was a big change, but I think most people will get used to it and come to like it as bugs are worked out and people learn to navigate around the new site. It's fantastic that you're able to get this kind of instantaneous feedback on the changes you've made!
meanwhile - great job on the my groups part - i LOVE LOVE LOVE being able to see the groups i own! yahoo! thanks for listening!
The new screen width is similar to the one chosen by the NY Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal. Sites (including Gather!) are starting to build in wider formats because more than half of those now browsing have monitors that accomodate them. That means we can create a better browsing experience by using the additional available space.
Candidly, we recognized that it might be an inconvenience for those still on smaller screens (I'm sorry!). When doing a total site redesign, though, we had to decide whether to step-up to the new format (which more and more people can benefit from) or stick with the old one. We decided to go wide.
I have asked our marketing team to find an electronics dealer that carries a variety of laptops and screens. We hope to make one available as an option for spending your Gather points in the near future.
Apologies in the meantime for your having to scroll right and left.
Allowing variable font sizes is in our plan. It requires significant testing to make sure the toggle doesn't break anything (especially if you toggle the interface elements as well as the text of articles, for example), but we do want to deliver this. Thanks for the reminder!
Candida- Thanks for the kind words. We do have a fantastic team. I am very fortunate to have people more talented than I am showing up at Gather every day.
We are working on load times on a number of pages on the site. Generally the site is doing well, but the my gather page and the namespace page (tom.gather.com, for mine, for example) are slower than we find acceptable. The team is working on a fix.
Thank you for the kind words. Praise always means more when it comes from a tough critic. :)
On this resolution, I still have to scroll to the side.
I will check into the 1024 scrolling question. All pages were designed to fit into that width; the horizontal scrolling bar should not be there. Your IM point is an interesting one as well. For a future release, I will suggest we send our testing team into (willing) Gather member homes and watch how they use the site as part of their overall web surfing.
Having parts of the site be customizable (left nav, the "my gather" page, groups pages, the namespace for each user) is in the product plan. We are experimenting with options now and will start a conversation on this topic when we better understand the alternatives.
Your suggestion on DHTML menus as drop-downs from the current tabs is an interesting one (and not that hard to implement). We switched to the tab format because a surprisingly high percentage of users did not realize that the menus pulled down at all. This meant that they missed core Gather functionality and could not easily participate in the community.
As you suggest, the new nav is far easier to use. Members and non members alike had a much easier time finding and doing things on Gather with this new navigation. That said, your thoughts here and Will Evans piece that suggests that power users will miss those menus are good feedback. We will see if there is a way to make power user navigation faster (as a brief aside, does anyone know why quick keys have not been implemented on websites?)
Having feedback throughout the design process is important, of course. Having instant feedback immediately after launch (in a very public way) like we do on Gather is game-changing. The community helps us find things that are not working instantly. The community helps us make adjustments in our first week (call it a "shakedown cruise") that makes the product much better going forward.
The challenge, of course, is differentiating between feedback that is due to unfamiliarity with feedback that is pointing out real problems and/or opportunities. It makes conversations like this one all the more important.
With the Carl Andre launch in place, I will ask Jim Bostick, our user experience guru, to put together a panel of visually impaired members to help us prepare a version of Gather that operates cleanly in a text mode. If you can suggest good design resources that might guide us as well, please email Jim and me. Thanks for sticking with us when the site is not optimized for your use.
If your resolution is above that, it should be working well. A couple people say we are running above that size for them and we will investigate.
We are looking at alternatives to the orange comment box. Stay tuned. :-)
Thanks, everyone, for the fantastic feedback (both positive and negative). I look forward to chatting with you all again soon.
Come to think of it, I have seen a page where my subscriptions are listed, but again, it's a slow journey in of endless waiting for the page and its comments to load.
I'm on an iMac and have high speed cable (no problem with the screen width, and I like the look). The slow pace of loading is not due to my system.
Every few hours I'm asked to re-sign into Gather for unknown reasons (since I've kept a window open). And all the pages load slowly - which uses up endless time.
How long I can do this when other sites and services offer a single feed of what you've subscribed to and an easy click in to comment is a question.
Unless I've missed something somewhere...