For the past month or so, we’ve been hard at work building a new look and feel for Pinyadda. Late last night after a final team-bonding, bug-squashing session, we pushed an jam-packed update out the door, complete with a sexified new look, some features you’ve all been asking for, and performance updates across the board.
Here’s a quick tour of the new features and a little description of each:
(Please note: A small fraction of the Pinyadda community is using Internet Explorer 7, and we are experiencing a few issues on this browser. Please bear with us as we work through these bugs.)
New Left Hand Navigation
This area is really the nerve center of your Pinyadda interface, and we wanted to add a hefty dose of customization as well as make this component easier for new users to navigate. We added drag-and-drop organization for sites and topics,a dead-simple folder structure to help you customize your news even more, and made sure that when you follow something new your navigation updates instantly. For those of you who’ve been concerned about leaving your RSS reader behind, this update should help ease the transition. Now you can keep your organizational standards and get all the great perks that come with a system that’s been built social from the ground up.
Notifications Functionality
We know that constant email updates can get annoying. But we also know that you like to be told when something cool happens, or if you’ve achieved a cool new reward. Our solution to this Catch-22 is the new notifications feature, which lets you know when good things happen without interrupting your experience on the site. Now, when you get a private message, unlock a reward, receive a recommendation or gain a new follower, you’ll get a notification that lets you easily view the update and take action. If you want to see all your notifications, just click on the link to at the bottom of the dropdown. And don’t forget to share!
Recommend Sites, People, and Topics
After seeing so many people evangelize their favorite sites on Pinyadda, tell us about their go-to topic feeds and suggest users your friends should follow, we wanted to be sure to provide an easy way to recommend the stuff you’re into to your friends and colleagues. Now, all you need to do is go to an individual site or topic feed or someone’s profile, click the gears button at the top right, and click “Recommend.” You’ll be prompted to select whether you want to send a recommendation to all your followers, or just to individual people (you can even enter an email address of a user not on Pinyadda). They’ll receive your recommendation in their notification tab at the top.
Redesigned Search Feature
We all have a pretty good idea of how a search function is supposed to work, and we needed to make ours do what our users thought it would. You gave us a lot of feedback on this one and the result is a simplified search box, auto-suggest feature, and redesigned results page does a much better job of helping you quickly find what you’re looking for. Whether you’re searching for articles, people, sites, or topics, just type your query into the box and we’ll do our best to read your mind. If you don’t see what you’re looking for in the auto-suggest field, just hit the enter key and you’ll be given a full page of sortable results.
Updated Information Architecture
This is a fancy way of saying we moved a few menu options to a place where they make more sense. If you’re trying to add a link to Pinyadda or submit an RSS feed for your favorite blog, you can now find those options under the Newsstand dropdown. See what we did there? The newsstand is as much yours as it is ours, and we wanted to make sure we made that clear.
While we know change is sometimes hard to deal with, we hope you all like these updates. They’re drawn in large part from your fantastic feedback and we continue to be incredibly grateful to have a such an engaged, dedicated, and thoughtful community. And please, let us know what you think! There’s a whole lot more great stuff on the horizon and we’ll be sure to share more soon.
Love,
The Yadda Squad
The first panel will cover how the editorial process has changed around gathering news, creating community, and user-driven content creation and aggregation. Pinyadda and BostInnovation’s product lead, 
No matter what you think about Steve Jobs’ 
There is so much news and information out on the web that it can be difficult and time consuming to filter through to the best, most relevant content for your business. How do you find and receive news and information? Once you find it, how do you share it with your colleagues? How do you then use it to generate leads, create community, and advance your business? Pinyadda is here to help on all these fronts.
Designing landing pages for web applications is one of the most difficult and yet most important tasks facing any product manager or designer. As the first face you show to the world, landing pages must communicate the mission, values, purpose, and function of the application in a matter of a few seconds. As we begin a journey to revamp our landing pages again, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the key drivers of successful landing pages are. In the end, it’s all about conversion – how much work can the page do for you. But on the way to clicking the ‘Sign Up’ button, there’s a lot that can happen.
Emotion: Regardless of how much we like to consider ourselves intellectual beings, we’re hard-wired to have emotional responses to visual stumuli. The web, as a very visual medium, requires us to consider the way designs impact the emotional satisfaction of those that visit our pages. There’s an instant response to the overall aesthetic of a page, driven by things like color and symmetry. Designing landing pages that create an emotional response is, by its very nature, an art more than a science. But it can be tested – five second tests, word association questions, and eye-tracking are all tools that can be used to get a general sense of what creates and emotional response and what doesn’t. The thing to remember about the emotional component is that it’s the first thing triggered – long before any text is read or any language can be processed. In fact, it’s likely that the initial emotional response prevents the processing of text and language until it’s over.
Information: The other side of the equation is the need for users to be informed. If the immediate emotional response is positive enough to keep a visitor from closing the page, the cerebral aspect of their brains will start searching for clues that satisfy curiosity and setup expectations. What’s going on here? What do I have to do? What’s going to happen next? These are the questions that a user is asking him or herself when they encounter any new service or application. Answering these questions as specifically as possible is important, but over-specificity can drive people with pre-conceptions away. If the service is described as something that’s useful for people who need mustard-spreading widgets (they’re in high demand these days), then you risk driving away those who might want to use the product to spread ketchup. Beyond the language of the initial description, we want to make sure we provide enough information to keep those who aren’t convinced on our domain as they continue to consider their options. While I’ve thought before that providing fewer options for more information might lead to more conversions, in recent weeks I’ve come to believe that it’s more effective to keep someone on your domain for as long as possible, and provide them with as many chances to convert as possible. If they’re not sure, I’d much rather have them click through to a ‘Learn More’ page than hit the back button and leave me forever.