Hello! Tom and I were the product leads on Stacks. It's the first product from Offset, the digital studio at MOO. Here's a short blog post: https://medium.com/offset-hq/int...
Making Stacks is invite only at the moment. Want to try it out? Request one on the site, and ping me! I'll send one your way.
Happy to answer any questions too.
With that change in tack, I wanted to look at the stack builder again. In this iteration, you can see the inline builder coming together:
http://cl.ly/aLKa
This is also the point tags switch from being on tools to being on Stacks. This made so much sense, and got rid of the repetitiveness of having to tag everything 'design' in a stack to do with design. We also built in an auto suggest for tags, inspired by the excellent Medium implementation.
Thanks @wanghq. I think it was Victor Hugo who said you can't fight an idea whose time has come. Perhaps this is one such idea.
I think your collection is really interesting, mainly because the language is very much around hackers, startups and building things.
In terms of where Stacks differs, I would like us to build a product that's more accessible to a wider audience. Our approach is to look a little further than just technology, and seek out people who can share expertise across many different slices of life.
You can see how the Stack formation was coming together in this third iteration.
http://cl.ly/aKXS
This is when I got into the idea of representing the tools you have stacked via a block of colour grid we generate. In the current version of Stacks, this a narrow bar to the left of the stack, but here, you can see me trying out a grid, and even a circular version!
This was followed by a second iteration. Here's another peek:
http://cl.ly/aKVbhttp://cl.ly/aLb2
This cut feels like the first time it clicked, and the idea for the stack you build crystallised. This is also when we introduced tags, but you'll notice they are on the tools; and not on the Stacks. More on this in a bit.
And I think that takes us through to the current iteration! Stacks is only a few weeks old, so I'd love to hear what you think and to get your feedback.
If you're curious about how we made Stacks, here's a stack on Stacks!
https://www.stackshq.com/@utku/s...
I thought it might be interesting to show the first ever cut of Stacks. Here are the first three screens that I put together: http://cl.ly/aKgb
The original idea was that everyone would have a single stack, and we'd ask everyone at least three default questions, such as who do you bank with, or which airline you travel with the most.
We quickly realised however, that (i) it felt too restrictive and (ii) maybe you hate your bank, but we were forcing you to choose one, under the assumption that it was a recommendation!
This is a very early wire of a homepage idea, where the focus was on selling Stacks on how individuals we would have on rotation get stuff done:
http://cl.ly/aKTy
This wasn't really clicking for us, and actually brought on the shift in thinking that made Stacks into what it is today: A complete stack — not the individual tools in it — is our point of focus.
Curious to know why there isn't a direct link out for each item in a stack? (I like to open a bunch of links from a page into new tabs and then flick through them)
@j_greig Hey James. We went back and forth on this decision, and in fact a bunch of the early designs have the links under item names: http://cl.ly/aLHF (As well as tags on them, but that's another story...)
Ultimately, it was a decision based on wanting to keep the stacks as clean as possible, but just today, we were discussing whether we should bring the links back. I suppose we will!
Interesting! Anyone has any idea about why there are so many similar tool collection services popping up recently? @utku, would you like to introduce what makes your service different to the related products?
Anyway, I made a collection http://www.producthunt.com/wangh...
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