Jun 24
Slow, Buggy UX and Frustrating Viz Setup
I was excited to try out Lapis because it offered charts and a writing tool, but a few things have made me decide to go back to Substack + any other data viz tool (eg. Datawrapper) for my purposes of wanting to write a short article with some simple bar charts. A few reasons:
- It's buggy and kinda slow. Sometimes buttons are not clickable, even the "Create draft" button when I just finished onboarding. Page loads are also a bit slow with animations and whatnot.
- UX issue 1: For some reason I missed the placeholder text saying I could type "/" to create a data viz. My instinct was to click on "plus" or look in the left panel. I had to look up your docs to figure this out.
- UX issue 2: Setting up a data viz took way more time than I expected. First there was the unexpected error of only numeric values being supported but not percentages. But then there's also the fact that I can't just copy paste values into the page and have to upload a file.
Overall I appreciate the product vision, but it's not as fast and easy to use, which was what I wanted out of a data viz storytelling platform. So I'll have to go back to the old alternatives.
In Progress
Hi there! I apologise for the late reply. First of all, thank you for writing this out! This is exactly the kind of feedback we're hoping for during Beta, and it has been really useful to us. Regarding the button-click issue, you've helped us identify a critical bug that we have since fixed. On the UX points: - The issue with the "/" command is feedback we've received quite a few times, so rest assured, you're not the only one who found it hard to discover. We're looking at making that entry point more obvious. - The percentage-value error is a gap in what our data handling supports, and it shouldn't have surfaced as an error in the first place. Thank you for bringing this to our attention! Similarly, we are also working on the copy-paste feature for the data sheet. - As part of a wider accessibility audit and improvements, we're also currently looking into animations/motion that may slow the website down or affect the user experience. - We will continue to optimise our performance and reduce load times. Since our team is very small, it might take us a while to get to some of these issues. I truly appreciate your patience, and for giving Lapis a shot in the first place. Thanks again for taking the time to write this! If it's alright with you, we'd like to get in touch once we have a stable release, in case you'd like to give us another chance. You can reach us anytime at hello@lapis-story.com :) - Joceline, Design Lead