@james.cutler sent me email this morning with some feedback based on starting to see the new TidBITS design as part of his morning reading. He noted that the purple star we use for pinned or sticky items threw him at first, because it didn’t say to him, “This article is important and has been pulled out of the chronological stream.”
He suggested a pin icon like this (I’m sure we could find one in purple):
So what do people think? Is the star OK once you realize what it is or does it have some other meaning (saying that the post is “important” isn’t really wrong, but saying that you should come back to it might be)? What other icon or indication for pinned/sticky posts would work better for you?
Note that we can have multiple pinned/sticky posts, so changing the line underneath, for instance, likely wouldn’t work.
I like the pin. Better than the star actually since the latter to me indicates favorites. I also like the suggestion to have explanatory text. If you don’t want text, Adam, could you do it as an alt tag?
I think I’ve misunderstood the star icon, as I thought it was meant to indicate the article was sort of higher importance (I realise that functionally it indicates it’s pinned, but I thought the reason for that was because it was a more ‘important’ article). What is supposed to be communicated? That these are longer/more in depth articles?
I think the issue with a pin is that indicates (to me) site notices, house rules, or an ongoing campaign or something that someone is drawing attention to. The implication being that once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it, and probably wouldn’t look at it again except for reference. So it might encourage people to skip over ‘pinned’ articles. In this sense, I think the star is good: it says, “hey, here are some important articles, check them out.” But I don’t know if you could somehow improve on that with a ‘long read’ icon. Or maybe I’m still misinterpreting why articles get pinned?
I’ll note that right now, on the home page the meaning of the stars can be inferred from context. Two starred articles dated 4/6 and 4/2, followed by an unstarred article dated 4/6, and as I scroll down I see everything else is unstarred and reverse-chronological.
I agree a pin is more descriptive, as “pinned” is a common term for this, but I don’t think it’s crucial.
