Keep Moving Forward

Vocal has come a long way since it's creation, and even since I joined up back in July. In just those four months, We've been given a word-count in drafts (SO much easier than copy-pasting everything into a word document to keep track!), subscriptions, and hearts upgraded to a form of a "Favorites List". New Categories are being added regularly, and Vocal is listening to feedback from its creators.

It's been great, don't get me wrong, but there will always be room for improvement, whether for organization, ease of access, or user accessibility.

So, without further ado, here's a short list of things Vocal can look at for the future.

Stats Search Function

Once you reach a certain number of stories posted, it becomes harder to keep track of the individual works. In four months, I've written over 80 articles. When I'm promoting my work on Social Media, it's a long and labourous process to go through all those pieces to find the one that best fits.

Someone asks for poems? I have four poems scattered over 9 pages of stats; that's a lot of scrolling.

"Post your first ever Vocal Story!" Doomsday Diary lurks somewhere around page 3 or 4, these days. If there's a spike in reads, maybe as high as page 2 or as low as 5.

Going to my public profile isn't much better, because while it's recorded in order of publication, that's still a lot to go through if the story I'm looking for wasn't one of my first, or most recent ones.

A search bar, where I could type in part of the title and be taken instantly to the results, would work wonders.

Profile Organization

I'm one of those people who writes about anything that takes my interest. Poetry, Fiction, Politics, Relationships, Personal Experiences, Recipes... there's a lot.

Some people pick a niche and stick with it, others seem determined to have at least one story for every category. Both of these are Valid, but it does make things tricky when a new reader navigates to a profile. Maybe they're looking for the next installment in a story. Maybe they finally found someone willing to write about the ongoing trashfire that is Australian Politics. Either way, they're stuck going through the profile page by page until they find what they're looking for.

There are a number of ways to resolve this. One is an option to filter stories by Category. Drop down and select Fiction, or Swamp, or Geek, or whatever you're looking for.

Another option would be to filter by keywords, like 'politics' or 'literature' or 'Harry Potter'. There is a search bar for that, but it brings up every story ever written on Vocal, with no way to filter by author.

Heck, go wild and do both!

Series Grouping

Following on from a more detailed Search Engine, this is another thing I'd really like to see.

I have five recipe-based articles up on Vocal. Three Percy Weasley headcanons (and more HP opinions in my draft folder). My SFS mini-series had eight entries, and my JAFF story is coming up on nine chapters. I link previous installments in each new article, of course, but after a while that starts to get long, too.

The ability to group stories together, whether in folders for "Recipes" and "Harry Potter", or merely the ability to link connected stories or articles in a series, would be invaluable.

This is especially true for collaborative works. I participated in my first Collaboration in October, the VCS Halloween Spooktacular. I was third, so I only had to keep tract of two other entries before mine, but wouldn't it be great if you could open a series tab and find links to multiple works by multiple authors? It's one of the things holding me back from doing more collaborations.

I dread to think what the poor person responsible for the concluding story must have gone through...

Separate Hearts and Favorites

It's great that we have the option to go back to "Stories You Liked" now, don't get me wrong. It's great that I can go back and find those stories a lot easier. (Especially if you're like me and have trouble remembering titles and which community a story was in...)

The problem is, it's forced me to be a lot more selective about leaving hearts.

Previously, I'd drop a heart every time I enjoyed reading a story. It didn't necessarily matter if I actually wanted to read the story again, or if I just thought that the writer did a good job, or if I wanted to encourage a newbie who'd just dropped their first story. Like it, leave a heart.

Now that leaving a heart adds the story to my "Stories You Liked" list, I have to either be prepared to scroll through a lot of stories to get to the ones I actually want to re-read, or stop leaving as many hearts.

Having two different options, one the equivilent of leaving kudos on Archiveofourown.org, the other a Favourite Button - a like and a love react, to use Facebook terminology - would help immeasurably.

Tipping Options

Currently, there are five tipping options: $1, $2, $5, $10 and $20. Anything beyond that, and you have to do some quick addition to divide the desired amount between multiple tips.

It could be as simple as adding an 'other amount' option, or eliminating the set amounts entirely and letting the tipper input whatever amount they want. Perhaps the tipping set up has minimum and maximum amounts per transaction; I wouldn't know.

Either way, it's worth looking at.

A Vocal App

Vocal Media, as it stands, is great if you're working on a laptop or computer. It's perfectly adaquete even on an iPad or tablet. No complaints whatsoever.

On a phone... well, it's less great.

I'm constantly having to log in again, only to find myself back at the top of a story thousands of words long. I have to zoom in to touch a drop-down arrow. Loading takes forever and a day. Don't even talk to me about trying to write an article on my phone.

One potential improvment is to have an app designed for phone use. It doesn't have to do everything the website does, but having a layout intended for smaller screens, and easier navigation, would be wonderful.

If you liked this story, leave a heart or a tip, and follow me on Vocal and Medium!