Hi Observable Team:
I’ve raised this before with during one of the initial UI overhauls, but I’d like to raise it again in a bit of a different context: I am still finding Observable official collections to be buried in the site, and I am also finding it increasingly difficult to track down notebooks I’ve read but not remembered where they’re filed.
In terms of being buried: The ‘Topics’ group is absent from a user’s home page. The ‘Quick Start’ page is close, but different. To get to the official collections, I can press ‘Explore’, and scroll all the way to the bottom… and I get some (but not all).
Now I am in collections (yay) and I have access to all sorts of wonderful content. I want to learn about Observable and D3.js, so I click into ‘tutorial’, and find – only 3 notebooks from Tom (miss you @tom and hope you’re well!). What about all the nice new notebooks from Anjana with helpful videos? Where are they? If I click on the Observable icon at the top, I can view all your notebooks and find them - but surely these are tutorials?
And the intro section… Now that ordered collections are available, could these please be ordered? It seems that they’re currently in reverse chronological order by post date… and there’s a lot in there. Maybe I am speaking only for myself, but I feel it would make a lot of sense for new users if the ‘5 minute intro’ notebook weren’t 3 pages deep in the intro collection.
I hope all my posts aren’t sounding too critical. I love this platform and have been on here nearly every day for about 2 years… so these are reflections from an unattached person who should be pretty familiar with the site.
By the way: to @mbostock @jashkenas, and @tom - I can’t get over how the three of you came together to start this project and to deliver a platform that was already hugely innovative and super polished before being ‘founded’ officially this year. Thank you for creating an avenue to more easily learn data science and web fundamentals for me and the world. It’s a true gift.