A few months ago, I asked the community about Recommending. Why did you do it? Why didn’t you do it? How could I encourage you to do it at least once a week for a story you really enjoyed?
I got a lot of terrific answers in the comments—thank you! We have made two changes on mobile devices to Recommending since then:
- The Recommend function, which was previously just a star at the top on mobile, became a button.
- Later, we added a second Recommend button for mobile at the bottom of the story, appearing after you’d read it, and we added a question with it:
Was this story worth reading? Recommending stories helps us to decide which stories are most important to show our readers.
Changing the star to the button at the top made no appreciable difference in Recommending. However, moving it to the bottom and adding the reason to push it definitely increased Recommending activity, essentially doubling per unique logged-in user on mobile devices. Success!
I’m very pleased—these Recommends are important feedback to authors who do good work, and they also mean more distinct people are deciding what stories appear in the Trending List, which I think is important.
So here’s the next question for all of you: how do you feel about the Star icon? Could we make this more clear?
Some of the feedback we have is that the Star, which is the icon Daily Kos has used for this function since dinosaurs roamed the earth, has come to mean instead of something like “Favorite” or “Bookmark,” and that this might be a reason people who are new to Daily Kos don’t press it.
A “thumbs up” icon (such as 👍) has become a kind of default, and several people have suggested it. On the other hand, it feels wrong to “like” ugly news. Another option could be the up arrow, something like ⬆️. Or a diagonal swooshy arrow, like so: ➚. There’s also the upward chart 📈, the up-pointing finger ☝️, or even 🚀. (Assume that any of these chosen would be given some sort of custom image that matches our branding.)
What are your thoughts? Would another symbol be more clear? Think of it not only as the you who has been Recommending stories for years, but as a newcomer who first came and didn’t know how the site worked. How would you like to see us convey “everyone should read this story?”