Design Review: The New Organize Experience

2017-05-10T20:47:03+00:00

Update: We launched the new organize experience! Read the announcement here.

At Feedly we’re focused on simplifying how you consume information every day. We help you find and connect to all the sources you need. The next step is giving you a simple, effective way to organize your sources by topic, project, industry, client, or passion.

Being able to re-organize these sources as your needs evolve is a critical part of controlling the signal-to-noise ratio in your Feedly. One of our goals for 2017 is to make re-organizing sources easier, faster, and more data-driven.

We started this journey by reaching out to the community and listening to your feedback. Thank you to the 27,000+ people who participated in the Organize survey by telling us how we could improve the experience. Here are some of the most popular requests from the survey:

  • Visibility into broken sources and publishing frequency
  • Ability to sort and filter feeds
  • Show personal reading statistics
  • Editing single sources and bulk operations to move or unfollow sources

00 — Design Direction

Based on the survey data, we decided to center the new organize experience on 3 features:

  1. Show a bird’s-eye view of your sources using filters for source activity (active, inactive, or unreachable) in a specific feed or by searching for a source by name
  2. Surface metadata about how useful each source has been to you recently. In the first version we’re focusing on the number of articles per month and how many of those you have read
  3. Make it easy to act on this metadata: select multiple sources and move or unfollow them

01 — Filter sources

During our research we found that on average most of you follow about 75 sources organized into 10 feeds. At the same time some users have 20,000 sources and more than 200 feeds.


One of our challenges was finding a way to enable you to manage a large number of sources as easily as just a few. We decided on an table-like interface with a list of all your sources along with some reading statistics. This list, combined with a powerful filter, should solve two big needs expressed in your survey responses: 1) to find sources that are either unreachable or too noisy, and 2) to see which of your feeds the source belongs to.

We also created some shortcuts for the most-used operations like finding unreachable or inactive sources.

In the new user interface, you can filter sources by activity and by the feeds they belong to.

02 — Reading Statistics and Source Status

The ultimate goal of the new organize UI is to help you optimize your signal-to-noise ratio. By reviewing your personal reading statistics, you can make informed decisions about the sources you follow. You will see 2 metrics to keep things simple: how often sources are updated, and how many of those updates you read.

We believe these metrics are correlated. If the feed is getting hundreds of new articles and you’re reading just a few of them, this is a good indication of where the “noise” is coming from.

03 — Batch Operations

Now that you know where most of your content is coming from and how you consume it, the next step is to take action. Our gut feeling (validated by the survey data) is that the most important actions are re-organizing your sources and feeds and unfollowing inactive or unreachable sources.

In the new Organize experience, it’s easy to move multiple sources at once. You can also group sources into multiple feeds. Lastly, you can unfollow multiple sources at once by selecting them and clicking “Unfollow.”

Next Steps

Soon we will push these changes to everyone who signed up for early access. After the early-access period ends, we will activate the new Organize experience for all Feedly users. In the meantime, we would love to hear your feedback on this new design.

Please leave us a comment below — we’ll write you back.

Stay tuned!