Thanks for the fast reply @sweetbeems and @seanblue. I imagined a dropdown in the library view where you can select if you own the digital/physical copy or something like that, but I also understand not everybody cares about that feature. So yes, the custom lists sound good.
On a completely different note - I tried to look up books with an authors name and nothing showed up, even though I saw some books from this author. Assuming I’m not the only person interested in this feature, would it be possible to make it so that works can also be looked up by using the author?
@MonnieBiloney I can certainly add a sort for that! Maybe ‘Most reviewed’?
Whoops! It looks like you’re right. I think that mostly impacts the first batch of books rated 5 stars, rather than anything below 5 stars. Will fix.
@momoni great, thanks for understanding! I think it’ll work quite well, as long as I make adding / removing / filtering to custom lists intuitive, which I think I’ll have to do, not really an option
Yes you aren’t the first one to notice . I am going to try to get that out this week, we’ll see. Unfortunately, it still won’t have the romaji versions of author’s names searchable, which is quite sad. I’m hoping to get romaji search soon, but it’s reliant on a few external approvals for API access, which I don’t fully control.
Sorry that I did not get back to you earlier on this, but to be honest, I was a bit confused as to what you were referring to, and then there was so much I wanted to point out to you but did not really know how to structure, so I got stuck in this mental block In hindsight I should have probably just written anything…
Anyways, I’ve reflected on Natively quite a bit during that time, and I finally had the idea that I should maybe let you follow me along when I use the site. I think that will help you better understand what works well for me and what doesn’t. And maybe it can give you some ideas for further development.
Discovering books
My main interest at the moment is to find books that I’ve read and that I haven’t selected yet, so that I can grade them.
I don’t search for specific books or authors because I’m too lazy to think about what to search for, so I just want to discover by browsing. So I e.g. open the Browse → Novels page. It is sorted by popularity. What I see is e.g.
Now I was looking for books I hadn’t selected yet, but there is no way to filter them out, so they all get displayed and are in the way. The best option I can have is “sort by recently added” but this blocks the sorting (I would ideally want to sort by level ascending if I were to look for new books to read).
For the series feature, it honestly took me a minute or more to figure out that clicking on the title takes me to the series page because it’s not indicated in any way. Also, while I can discover on this page whether I added a standalone book or not, I cannot discover on this page whether I added a book from a series or not. I need to open a second page and look at that, which is always quite disruptive to me. (That’s the reason why I suggested the inline display of the books in a series in the “Books” page and/or a small indicator for the status of the books in a series.)
Discovering grading
The grading mechanism is something that makes this page unique, so I visit it in order to grade books
How can I discover whether I can grade something? I go to my dashboard and look at
But unfortunately there is no way to tell whether I can grade something or not, because the button always looks the same. It happened to me two or three times in the last ~2 weeks that I graded everything and the next day there was more available for me to be graded (I understand that you’re just developing the algorithm so that’s not my complaint at all) but it was by pure chance that I discovered that because I clicked the button… Turning it to disabled state when there is nothing to grade would be a very helpful minimal starting point.
But didn’t you recently mention that you would use the grading for the whole series? Why does it say “Volume 1” here for both mangas? I found this confusing.
Also, later I checked the gradings on some books’ pages and it turns out that most of the time you accumulate all gradings on the first volume of a series (but not always - I guess this is due to older data that was added for further volumes and was not cleaned up after the switch?) This looks a bit weird, as volume 1 has so much information that technically should apply to all volumes but is not visible for them. I was thinking maybe splitting this information out into a “series” page might make more sense altogether? That might also make the gradings procedure less confusing for me as you could simply use the “series” page in the grading.
The issue with non-discoverability whether an action is possible also applies to the “grade this book” button on the book page. It was enabled on the page of a book I had not read yet, so I clicked it, only to get a dialogue telling me that I can’t do the grading yet. Felt a bit like being baited
Now to put these two together, I went to the page for 3月のライオン volume 2, a book I have read but which was not included in the grading (because it’s volume 2). And sure enough, the button was there. I clicked it and it told me
Like above, the button was there but I could not perform any action. Furthermore, this page tries to console me by offering to grade different books. Sure enough I clicked it, and sure enough I got
@MonnieBiloney I’ve added that ‘most reviewed’ sort and somewhat fixed the ‘highest rated’ sort. My ‘fix’ was to simply showcase book results, rather than the normal ‘book’ / ‘book series’ results for both of these sorts. So, for instance, よつばと！１ is shown, not a result for the よつばと！series. It’s a little unexpected, as I keep the ‘books’ / ‘book series’ mix for the other sorts, but I wanted to get you something while I try to figure out better handling for series in search results. I think it’s relatively intuitive, but I will talk a little more on handling series better in my reply to Nicole…
Oh no haha - didn’t mean to cause trouble! I was talking about your own personal library, so the ‘My Resources’ page you can now collapse series. Still haven’t implement your solution for the search results, which it seems is where the majority of your issues are anyway.
On Discovering Books
I hear you. You want the ‘exclude my library’ toggle which Naphthalene was talking about. That’s relatively easy, maybe I can prioritize.
Right, I hear you! I’m just trying to think through priority between that and community features, but maybe i’ll do that first.
I agree though, needing to click through to another page really does hurt the browsing experience, especially for advanced users like yourself who already have added a lot of books to their library. I’m hoping that once I roll your suggestion of the series popout it will be a lot better, but it is a tricky issue!
On Discovering Grading
Right, I know i get annoyed too that I don’t just prompt when there are gradings. Unfortunately though, it’s less trivial than you might think to calculate if you have gradings. I have a ton of logic which cuts down massively on how many comparisons you need to do, from level filtering to series handling to skip handling all the way to limiting only 6 comparisons required for a book. I will add this prompting feature at some point… at the very least check every hour or something. It just will take a bit of thought and work of which I have to be somewhat thoughtful on how I use. I know though, it’s annoying and I will fix, just might not be before community initiatives and whatnot.
I know! I’m sorry
So you’re probably rightly confused and I probably should give more explanation. I am asking you to compare volume 1 there, not the series. I know that a lot of people might grade the series and that’s mostly ok with me - if you can’t remember / don’t think there’s much variation in the series, then it’s probably a pretty close approximation. But there are a few benefits on asking for a volume comparison:
I think it is clearer on what I’m asking for. For instance, i’ve read that 本好き may get quite a bit more difficult in later volumes. I even had some people in the early days of my site saying that ふらいんぐうぃっち was a little more difficult in later volumes. Asking for a comparison with a specific volume makes what you’re grading a bit clearer.
I retain the ability to switch any series to what I call a ‘variant’ series later on (each book gets an individual difficulty rating). While this may be rare, asking for comparisons on a specific volume lets me keep those comparisons if I ever decide to make the switch.
You are correct that for most series, I do simply apply the rating to the entire series, but I do want people grading wrt volume 1.
As you probably now understand, this is all a result of me asking for a comparison on a specific volume. If you’ve marked the first volume finished, then I always ask you to do comparisons on the first volume in order to consolidate the gradings. However, not everyone has the first volume finished and thus in some cases, gradings accumulate on other volumes (容疑者Xの献身) is probably the most egregious example.
I am, however, doing a bit of work on the gradings display this week and that is one thing I can improve… I’ll simply include an ‘other volumes gradings’ section so that you have access to all the gradings in one spot.
I really, really appreciate your feedback and giving that walkthough, it’s given me a lot to think about. I hope my responses make sense, but I’d love to talk more about it if you want! I certainly haven’t figured it all out and feedback like this really helps. I’ll think on trying to prioritize some of those features (personal library exclude, series popout on the search page, grading prompt). I certainly don’t want you when on the site… . I still would love your feedback on the ‘collapse series’ in the ‘My Resources’ page if you still have interest, but I also don’t want to take up all your freetime, so really no pressure!! In order to clear up confusion though, here it is in action:
Notice the toggle in the upper right for ‘collapse series’? You can now collapse series that way. You do see the most highly ranked result in the series by default, but you can spring open the other series items as well. I have thought of getting rid of the default result and forcing you to open up the series if you want any items, which may be more intuitive, not sure. Here is it clicked open:
Edit: @NicoleIsEnough After thinking about your message more, I think I will prioritize the series popout on the search page before I dig into community / lists. I think that will mitigate a lot of your need for the personal library exclude (but don’t worry that’ll eventually come too). In addition, I’ll explain how the series grading is being handled when I overhaul the book page gradings display.
Yeah, I’ve already had a few requests for Visual Novels, I know people find them useful. Unfortunately, I’d have to think about how to handle explicit content with that category as ecchi content is pretty widespread. It also gets a bad rap because of that, which makes me somewhat wary as I do want the website to be appealing to educators / general populace, who may (?) be a little wary of it? I’ll have to talk to more people about it, think more about it and do more research before I add it.
It’s definitely something I need to explore at some point, just isn’t currently prioritized over other content types (anime, tv shows, movies, new websites) for the reasons I laid out above. Of course, if I get a lot of requests for it, I may reconsider my prioritization. I’ll add your name to the request pile as a vote for!
First off, I will start using this standardized format for product update messages so that you can search for them easier. I may edit my previous announcement too.
Summary:
The search page now has a filter ‘Exclude personal library’ when logged in
Series search results now have a button to go to the series page and a button to expand the series right there in the search results
Series now indicate how many books you have in your library
Exclude personal library details
The ‘Exclude personal library’ filter lives in the ‘Additional Filters’ section of the search filters. Do note that if you have any books in a particular series, that entire series will be excluded from results
Series with no personal library items will be completely blue - this blue button for series and green button (‘+ Wish List’) for solitary books are hopefully easy visual indicators on what you haven’t added yet.
Series with a personal library item appear gray. The number in the green circle is how many items you have in that series
For series, the button on the left goes to series page. The button on the right showcases how many total books are in the series and will expand below when pressed
As you can see here, the entire series is visible on the row below. If a series has too many items for one row, you can scroll to the right. Only one series can be open at a time.
Concerns / Potential feedback
Search will be slightly slower with all the series information being sent. Do you notice the slower speed? Is it inconvenient?
Is it too colorful? What do we think of the colors?
Is search now more intuitive and convenient? Confusing things?
Well I finally made an account. First thing I noticed is that I didn’t have to verify my email address. Would probably be best to have a verify email to avoid the “forgot my password and accidentally gave an invalid email address” situation, which would mess up password resets.
Also, some (I assume unintentional) text wrapping in this button.
How come there’s a scroll bar here? It doesn’t seem likely that you’d ever need to scroll.
The editing on the My Resources page looks fine, but on a given book’s page the year is cut off.
Regarding the editing, I find it unintuitive having the first month option be December and the first day option be the last day of the month. I’d personally prefer it to go in ascending order, even if the year is still descending. It’s also (somewhat) unintuitive to hide future months when the current year is selected. Since the year is the current year by default, this basically forces you to edit the year first, which I find odd. I’m having trouble coming up with a good suggestion, but I think the editing functionality can be significantly improved.
Also, just something to consider, but you might want to make the finish date optional. Even if you still set the current day as the default when a book is marked as finished, I’m not sure everyone knows the date they finished every book or wants to track it that closely.
Another thing I noticed, is that having a trailing space in your search term can give no results. I’d recommend removing leading and trailing whitespace.
In My Resources, how come I can’t sort by title or author?
I tried doing some grading and there is a book I don’t remember well enough to grade. So I tried the advanced setting to say to block all grading for that and clicked the “Update & Skip” button, but then it still displayed the same grading comparison (so it didn’t actually skip). Seemed to work fine when I tried it with a second book though.
Right. I guess that’s a personal thing of mine, I get annoyed by those things. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think it’s rare someone actually puts in an incorrect address.
Very unintentional and surprising. Mind if I ask your browser? I didn’t hit this with Safari, Chrome & firefox
Again, I don’t see this in chrome, so I probably just need to do better testing in your browser.
That’s probably right
Hmm, perhaps I can think on it. I can look at what others do, but I think it’s pretty similar. The only alternative would be to allow any value, which isn’t a terrible suggestion as long as I error out correctly.
Potentially, I’ll have to think on it. I do have this power ordering on the book page too, as well as the ‘recently read’ on your profile page. I could simply put null items at the end, but it’s a little sad.
Is that right? I’m surprised actually… well search is on my immediate docket of things to do, i’ll add on the list.
Kanji sorting is a little unintuitive. I could potentially do this once I have the romaji for the authors / titles, but can’t until then.
Huh, that’s disappointing. I haven’t had an issue with it but i’ll note that down. It’s been an extremely infrequently used feature, but perhaps that’s a contributing cause? I’ve tried it again and couldn’t replicate it, but i’ll take a look at new accounts.
Thanks for all this feedback though! Hope you’re not put off by it too much!
Edit: I could not replicate the bug, originally said I could. Will investigate
Chrome. I’m on a 13ish inch laptop screen with 1080p resolution, but at 125% zoom on Windows. Maybe something about the small screen and zoom is causing this. Though the JavaScript variables I’m familiar with for browser width and height already account for things like Windows zoom, so I don’t know.
I’d suggest keeping it simple and just sorting by unicode. All I wanted was to see books from the same series or author back to back in the list.
Nah, it’s all good. I know it’s a work in progress, and I’m sure it’ll keep getting better. I mostly joined now for two reasons:
I wanted to balance out some of @Naphthalene’s high reviews for everything.
I wanted to get some of the more obscure manga I’ve read added to the site. Though to be honest, I’m still not sure how I want to handle rating them since I don’t usually rate individual volumes of manga.
For now, here are the manga series I’d like added. I’m sure there will be more later once I go through everything properly. But I confirmed that these aren’t on the site yet.
ひとりぼっちの〇〇生活
こみっくがーるず
ブレンド・S
そらコミュニケーション
きんいろモザイク
うらら迷路帖
がっこうぐらし
お兄ちゃんはおしまい
徒然日和
ストロベリー・フィールズをもう一度
狼少年は今日も嘘を重ねる
ルミナス＝ブルー
此花亭奇譚
このはな綺譚
大人になっても
ヒナまつり
私の百合はお仕事です！
まどかのひみつ
魔法少女サン&ムーン~推定62歳~
I know that’s a lot, but I appreciate it! Let me know if you have trouble finding any of them.
Ah interesting. I never use zoom, so that’'s good to know. Granted, I don’t know how much I’ll actually optimize for zoom, but we’ll see
Huh. I guess that’s a good use case. You’re right.
hey now she really did hate 5分後に意外な結末 - 赤い悪夢 it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
Right i’ll be curious to hear your thoughts on that. It’s always the first volume only and, like you said, you think of most manga not really varying in difficulty… so if you do think that about a particular series, my expectation would be that the first volume is a good enough proxy.
Great! Thanks for all of these, can add! FYI there is a little add widget on platform (bottom of browse all page or no results page). I do ask for an estimated level & an amazon link there though, so it is a little pain for a list dump like this. I’ll just put them all at an estimated level of 26 for the time being.
Ah, I meant… scoring I guess? I don’t know the website terms yet. I meant the score from 1-5, not the difficulty comparison from one series to another. The difficulty comparison should be a lot easier since I can just consider entire series and not worry about individual volumes.
Basically, I’m worried that you’re adding a bunch of manga for me, but that I won’t give most of them scores, so other users still won’t have much to go by… maybe I’ll either only score the first volume or just give all volumes the same score most of the time. I may be able to score an individual volume accurately on occasion, but generally I won’t be able to.
Oh you’re talking about the quality rating, 1-5 stars? I see. Yeah just rating the first volume is fine I think! My impression is that most people go to the first volume when they’re browsing and choosing between series, so any general written reviews / quality ratings for the entire series should live there.
I know people have also requested quality ratings / written reviews at the series level too and certainly could add that as well. I guess my impression has been that’s not normal from my experience of other websites, but perhaps I’m wrong. It does get a little confused with being able to rate both places, but probably could figure out an intuitive UI
My standard for review is
5 stars: great
4 stars: good
3 stars: meh
2 stars: bad I don’t think I will ever finish a book I would deem 1 star. Nevermind, there was 5分後に意外な結末 - 赤い悪夢 indeed. The power of book club carried me through.
I think it depends on the intent of the website. On Amazon for example, you usually rate individual volumes. I think you can rate entire series too, but I don’t think many people do. AniList (a site specifically made for tracking anime, manga, and light novels) only lets you rate entire series. Since I already rate the manga series I’ve read on AniList, it would be significantly easier to rate them by series on Natively since I’d just convert my score from a 10 point scale to a 5 point scale. But again, I’ll figure something out in the meantime to at least add some difficulty ratings for these manga.
This is related, but I find it odd that when looking at a series it gives the number of ratings as the sum of the number of ratings for the individual volumes. I think it gives the false impression that a series is much more popular than it actually is. A 15 volume series averaging 5 stars from 15 reviews? Must be really good! A 15 volume series averaging 5 stars from 1 review? I guess a person liked it.
I don’t think Amazon does actually - at least I don’t see quality ratings on their series pages. Obviously you can rate bundle sets though. I’ve heard of AniList but hadn’t really explored it til this morning - much nicer UI than myanimelist I’m bit surprised they don’t have 本好き though!
I’ll think on the series ratings / reviews. It’s been a very frequent (and understandable) ask so I probably should just add it. Since I do frequently bundle series and I emphasize the series page more than a place like Amazon, it probably does make sense. If I go this route, I’ll just have to go all in and make the series page an excellent page to visit (showcases series reviews, comparisons, and optionally volume reviews), which probably makes sense. It just is a little tricky having two potential spots people land for a series (vol 1 or series page) and multiple places to review, so I’ll have to be thoughtful about how I do it. I’ll explore more websites too and see if I find one that really does this well.
Yeah I agree. I thought about making it the number of unique quality raters and the rating average be the average between users averages for the series… but that’s also a bit nonintuitive too (you could see a series have only 1 rating and click in to see every volume has one rating). I agree though, it falsely presents some series as way more popular.
They do have it. It’s just not the first search result for some reason, and they have it split into one entry per arc. And yeah, the UI is much nicer. I switched from MAL to AniList years ago when MAL shut down their website for multiple weeks and shut down their API for significantly longer (making the third party app I used no longer work).
Perhaps one point of emphasis on the series page could be the first volume. Then maybe you’d get the best of both worlds.
The name of this book is so long that I can’t hit the (x) button to remove the “skip”. Hovering over the (x) just counts as hovering over the link for some reason.
. I am going to try to get that out this week, we’ll see. Unfortunately, it still won’t have the romaji versions of author’s names searchable, which is quite sad. I’m hoping to get romaji search soon, but it’s reliant on a few external approvals for API access, which I don’t fully control.
In hindsight I should have probably just written anything…
hey now she really did hate 
