The New Tea Page

235 Replies
Anna said

Oh, there are two threads for this! You all bring up very valid points – I already wrote a comment here, I’ll just paste the link rather than make a double post – sorry if I repeated a lot of what you already said:

http://steepster.com/discuss/6948-omg-steepster-has-a-new-look?page=4

Jason select said

Cool, I’ll reply in the other thread.

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I agree with most comments about having the company description up front and decluttering a bit. I also agree that the like button is hard to click for whatever reason. I just wanted to add that it’s hard to find my previous tasting notes for a particular tea (especially when said tea had hundreds of other tasting notes already). It would be nice on the tea pages to have “your notes” and “other users notes” separately. Alternatively, make our tealogs easier to search by teas. I hope I’m making sense and not rambling incoherently haha.

Anna said

No, you make perfect sense – besides, if I recall correctly, a feature/UI helping us to more easily find our own tasting notes has been one of the most frequently requested additions/fixes.

No you are sense making. :D I agree! It’s also annoying to find my tasting notes if there are hundreds.

Dustin said

I spend a lot of time searching for my old tasting notes trying to remember how I prepared it, how well I liked it and if there was something else I was meaning to do to improve my cup in the future. So I’d love to be able to find my notes among other reviews much easier!

looseTman said

“I’d love to be able to find my notes among other reviews much easier!”
Have you tried:
http://steepster.com/YourNameHere/feed.rss
Example: http://steepster.com/dustin/feed.rss

AnnaEA select said

Thank you, looseTman! kludgey, but it’ll work until the devs give us a good solution.

Hmm, that link doesn’t work at all for me. I get “500 Internal Server Error.”
Ahh, I figured it out. Or it’s been fixed. This feed thing is hard to read through. Without using CTRL+F, it’s impossible to navigate.

I think making the tealogs searchable by keyword (which we get to define for our own log) would be excellent. I would love to be able to search for the type of tea (or flavor) and display everything I’ve rated of that type or that contains that type. As my list gets longer and longer I have more trouble keeping the names of teas and what company they come from straight in my head. ;-)

Dustin said

I get the internal server error page too. :/

Jason select said

Good suggestions, we’ll add those to the list!

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Lala said

I feel like the new way of writing a tasting note is much more complicated than it should be. It is time consuming to review the note after it has been typed and then if you have to edit it, there is a lot more clicking involved then there used to be. When I write a tasting note, I will just type and go back and review it for grammar, etc, later. But with the new format I found it difficult to quickly re-read the note.

I am also finding that on a lot of tea pages that the info/description of the tea is now missing where previously there was a description.

Another note on the tea pages, it looks really jumbled and “busy” now with the new format. It would be nice if it could be cleaned up a bit. Maybe put all of the in cupboard, shopping list, who has it, who wants it, etc, all on one side or on the bottom of the page.

Jason select said

I responded to some of your points in another post, which you can see here: http://steepster.com/discuss/6947-the-new-tea-page?post_id=125633#forum_post_125633

As to the tasting note point, there is more data now so there is inherently more going on. But you can still skip the same fields that you could before and log without a note/any of the other info if you want to do that. So hopefully it’s not troublesome if you’re just looking to log or write something quickly.

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Dustin said

I agree with most of the suggestions made and have run into similar issues with ease of using the new format, BUT I want to add that the new top bars on the tea pages that show the picture of the tea and a magnified out of focus slice of that picture are dead sexy! It really makes the pages look nice!

Lala said

I agree with you on the sexiness of the tea pics. Steepster is spicing it up!

Anna said

Yes, I forgot to add that to my list of likes. Super sexy.

+1

Jason select said

We are a sexy bunch, working all night to make tea even sexier ;)

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Lala said

I have also lost my profile pic sometime after the upgrade. I am not able to upload a pic anymore. I go into my profile, upload the pic, I do not get an error or anything, it shows it is uploading the pic but it is still blank when the uploading is done.

Sil select said

uh your profile pic is there silly.. still the same. :)

Lala said

It doesn’t show up on my comp! Ha ha. This is some kind of conspiracy theory or something…

Jason select said

Yea, we added the feature just for you ;P.

If you’re still having an issue, shoot us an email. feedback at steepster.com

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sansnipple said

One problem I’m seeing with the new page header is that teas with longer names are getting their names just half cut off, with the page url the only indication what should be after that … Especially annoying with puerhs where lots of them have very similar long names It makes it really hard to tell which one you’re looking at.

Anna said

Oh, man, yes, that’s SO ANNOYING. Gah! I just looked at the latest tea you reviewed, and seriously, the horror.

+1 I wondered if this was just me because I’m using a netbook with a small 10" screen. I guess not! This really needs to be fixed. If they’re going to cut off the tea name, it needs to be readable in its entirety somewhere else on the page.

Jason select said

Good point. I think we used to have it on an earlier design of the new tea page, but it got cut somehow…we’ll look into how we can do that.

In the mean time, only drink teas with short names! :)

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Kat said

Is there a way we could add flavors or ingredients without having to send an email? I like to make sure those areas are up to date, but I went to list ingredients to a tea today, and I had to add an ingredient, and I ended up just not listing it because I had to email a suggestion, and that made me feel uncomfortable and required me to copy and paste the email into gmail, and I think there should be an easier way.

carol who said

Just want to agree with Kat. How annoying is it to not have basic flavors and aromas listed. Just let us type them in or give a more complete list of choices. Often I found only one or maybe two of the flavors I sense but it doesn’t include the rest that makes it more distinctive. (Oh by the way – what does chicken soup tea come from… maybe thyme, rosemary with a few more herbs??) I’d much rather have a listing of herbs, spices, individual berries, etc.

Jason select said

We’re planning to make this a form submission in the near future. We kept it as an email suggestion for the time being to 1) make it easier to get the product out the door 2) to try and maintain the integrity of the data. But with all the suggestions we’re getting it would be easier to open that suggestion up – hopefully soon.

I have never been able to use the “suggest a flavor” function. This is frustrating, because your choices are so limited and do not cohere with my experience in most cases. So I feel as though I am limited by your list. When I do find a flavor which matches something I taste, I feel lucky, but I also realize how false the flavor reports are since most of what I taste is not listed. The people who are reporting flavors are of necessity selecting from your idiosyncratic list whatever labels come closest—if any—not what they really taste.

Jason select said

Yea, this wasn’t intended to be a long term solution. We defintely want to expand the list so that it stays relevant and useful, hoping to have an update to address that.

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I posted the following comment on the Steepster Blog before I saw this discussion:

Overall, the changes are AWESOME! I really like the new “from our community” section with the ability to upload multiple pictures and see who has it and who wants it. That’s a very cool feature, especially for those into swapping. The tasting notes are so much more aesthetically pleasing, as well as useful.

It’d be nice if the cupboard & wishlist pages were revamped too to view more or less items per page. Maybe add a feature to mark a tea in your cupboard as up for swapping or not, and otherwise add categories for easier navigation (e.g. green, white, large quantity, sample size, permanent, re-stock, etc).

I agree with PP that the new font is pretty weird looking. Also, long tea titles are cut off for me. Not sure if it’s because I’m on a netbook (so it’s because of the small screen) or if all tea titles are cut off after a certain number of characters. If it’s the latter, then it’d be nice if there was another spot to view the full name in its entirety. Also, it’s my personal preference that the newly enlarged “similar teas” section appear below the tasting notes since when I go to look at a tea, it’s primarily to read the notes, not find similar ones.

Finally, there are still some teaware items that appear as teas. I tried to edit one to convert it, but that wasn’t an option. Maybe you could make an option to delete a tea that doesn’t have any tasting notes so it can be re-added under the correct category? I’d love to be able to merge duplicate teas too. But anyway, I’m really pleased! Great work, guys!

Jason select said

Thanks for all the kind words. I’ve responded to a number of comments here: http://steepster.com/discuss/6947-the-new-tea-page?post_id=125633#forum_post_125633

We do need to improve the process for editing/adding teaware, that’s on our list. We’ll also check the font, you’re not the first people to mention that.

Would you mind sending your feature ideas not related to the tea page (the cupboard stuff) to feedback at steepster.com? We’re using that now to capture all the ideas/requests so that will help us capture that. Thanks!

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Anna said

The new font (which I find very pretty in Chrome) looks really bad in FF – oversized and boldfaced.

Jason select said

We’ll take a look at that.

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Pyroxy select said

Okay, so I finally have a pretty solid complaint…can we please have the little tick marks on the ratings slide back? I don’t rate on an absolute scale, instead preferring to say “well, was this better or worse than this rooibos or that chai?” and those little marks really helped me figure it out.

Other than that, the flavor section is kinda annoying since most of us put them in our note/review. I do like the ingredients list, though, as it lets me see right off the bat if there’s something I’m absolutely not interested in consuming.

Jason select said

Hmm, those should be in there…I’ll have to follow up on that.

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