Use It First
Yesterday I shipped Side Quests. Today I sat down to use it, and never reached the feature I had planned. I ran into four distinct problems while using yesterday’s Side Quests build:
- The rating stars filled with unusual behavior. The half-star widget would not fill the stars properly because it draws them with a text character the font does not contain. That clipped the right edge off every star. Each device substitutes a different font and clips by a different amount, which is why it had always looked worse on a phone.
- The rating action was unusual. Clicking a star lit it, but the only way to see the choice was to move the mouse off the widget, and then press a separate Save button.
- After saving, it would jump me around on the page. Saving reloaded the page and landed me in the bottom third of it each time. I wanted to avoid JavaScript, but it was the only way to get the behavior I want for users. A browser never tells the server where a page was scrolled to, so nothing can put a reader back where they were without a script.
- The homepage showed the wrong number. A show I had rated 4.5 displayed its TMDb rating instead. TMDb rates on a 0-10 scale and we rate on 0.5-5, so we now divide the TMDb rating by 2 to bring it onto ours.
Side Quests is meant to find shows at the edge of a taste. After yesterday’s build, it was showing the top recommended shows based on the three shows I rated. So I added distance as a second variable. Side Quests now takes both connection and distance into account, and it penalizes centrality, which just means a show sitting at the center of everything already recommended will not rank highly as a side quest. Now there are shows in the row that no recommendation list would have surfaced.
For a more in-depth explanation of the Side Quests change, read this ADR. The decision to let TVLens have its first line of JavaScript is here.