With the project pretty much fully developed, I was able to move on to some detail work. Specifically, the use of language throughout and the end feeling of finality.

http://petty-about-books.herokuapp.com/

Disclaimer

Twitter Functionality

Lastly, I wanted to build in a tweet functionality. My original idea was that there could be an account that users can push their bookcovers out through, which would tweet @NYTimesBooks. However, when I started to interact with the tool with this in mind, I realized that would be assuming a big risk in terms of content moderation. There’s nothing in place to prevent a user from drawing something offensive, and I didn’t want to have to manage that side of things for a project like this.

I then started to investigate how a user could tweet their updated cover. Some research into this revealed that it’s not really possible, although there is a possibility that twitter cards could do it. I was thinking of building more interaction and guides, where a user could be prompted to save the updated cover as an image and then encourage them to tweet it. Frankly, it seemed like way too much complexity for a project of this size for a not that impressive payoff.

So I went back to basics, and relooked at the purpose of the experience, which is to give a platform to pettyness. The art here is not about the messed up book covers as the result; it’s the internalized narrative of being a petty human. So to continue that narrative, I modified this tweet button with a random selection of pre-populated text. This was really fun and helped me re-channel the voice of the project. Having to determine what lines were landing, which were too serious or mean, was a fun challenge. I hope the writing demonstrates that this petty person is a writer and thinks perhaps a bit too much of themselves, compared with what they are writing. I also hope that if someone actually tweets one of these, that it hurts zero people’s feelings.

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Safari on Mobile

I still haven't been able to resolve the touch issues for Safari on mobile. So I'm taking a cheat way out. I added a pop-up that will appear on mobile to encourage users to use the Chrome browser on mobile. I don't love this solution, but at least it provides an additional opportunity for me to tap into the language and voice of the project.