Columize

Ulysse Sabbag
Ulysse’s Work
Published in
5 min readJul 17, 2015

I want to thank Nour Sabbag (logo, visual identity), Carlos Lavilla (strategy, cofounder) and Walid Khoury (precious advice) without whom this would not have been possible.

This is where it all began for me.

Be sure to check the Loop for iOS article, my current project.

In this post, I shall explain what Columize is and what my involvement in creating this product was. I’ll then explain the reasoning behind some decisions before concluding with Columize’s story.

Sadly, the service has stopped running.

Overview

Columize was a service that made it possible to create lists of related URLs. Think Pinterest boards or Spotify playlists especially tailored for news. Think a social Instapaper.

I had the original idea when I realised that mobile blogging and RSS reading were flawed and could lead to less friction in sharing content. I’ll explain the story at the end of this article.

Role and evolution

As I was studying philosophy, politics and economics at University, I initially worked with a team of designers and a team of developers to bring Columize 1.0 to life — I didn’t design the first prototype myself.

The original product was an RSS reader with a curation tool. You could create collections (mini/topical lists of links with a small reaction corresponding to each post) directly from the RSS reader.

Then I realised that we were building two products at once, an RSS reader and a curation tool. Perhaps it’d be better to focus on the latter and build APIs to make the link between RSS readers/news consumption websites and Columize.

We pivoted from building an app to building a website. Why?

Let’s remember this was before iOS 8's share sheet. Indeed, before 2014, the devs behind RSS readers needed to integrate Columize in their app’s share sheets. They wouldn’t because Columize was an unknown service. So we decided to build a website instead. iOS 8 killed this problem and made Columize as an app much more attractive. But we had already started working on the website.

It’s only then I decided to take things into my own hands and learn about UI/UX.

Design Decisions

The evolution of the column

The evolution of the column, 2011–2012.

The original idea behind Columize was to blog directly from an RSS reader. Instead of pushing content to a platform such as WordPress or Tumblr, you’d push content to your Columns, which were topical linkblogs. Columns were public and were made of links and optional reactions.

In the Columize app, you’d read the news from your RSS sources and then Curate relevant posts to your Columns.

The last version of the mobile app before we started working on the website.

Notice the last version? This was before iOS 7 was released but it was already flat as a penny. I was heavily inspired by Loren Brichter’s Letterpress which, if I remember correctly, opened a debate in the designer community on flat design.

Here we showed the number of new items (8) over the total number of items Philipp Dermoth curated (20) instead of just the number of unread items. Tapping on the column author would have lead you to all his columns instead of this particular column and the visual hierarchy emphasised this. Showing the description instead of the last curated item gave columns a more blog-like appeal.

The Newsbox

Fast-forward a couple of months. We’re now building the web app. Columize now only is a curation tool, and you add content to your Columns by using a bookmarklet.

After some user testing, we realise that the bookmarklet isn’t enough. So we think there must be a way to send links to Columize to “curate later”. We call this the Newsbox. The Newsbox would be like a unified inbox/buffer zone for URLs where the links you send to Columize stay before you curate or delete them.

We built Columize with a Twitter sign-in, so I thought a good product idea would be to pull favorite tweets and put them directly in the Newsbox, so users could curate directly from Columize, without having to add content, thus easing the onboarding experience.

Post-mortem thoughts

Columize was my first entrepreneurial project. It taught me the foundations of everything I know today.

From dirty, misaligned UI elements to pixel-perfection. From learning about essential visual design concepts, and more deeply getting to formalise my intuitions about interaction design, to learning about agile development and working with a team. Most critically, I learned about prioritising and focus.

Don’t start with the interface, start with the user. Don’t go on with typography, focus on making navigation simple and crystal-clear and everything will follow.

The story

It was a rainy afternoon in London and I was riding the train when I realised there was too much friction when I wanted to send a post from my RSS reader of choice, Byline, to my blog which was hosted on Tumblr.
I thought to myself: “man, wouldn’t it be great if I could blog directly from my RSS reader?” These are the thoughts that come to the mind of a guy who read 500k+ RSS items in 4 years.
Originally called “SRSSR” for Social RSS Reader, Columize took form then, in November 2011. I wanted to enhance Google Reader and transform the Shared Items stream into something better. After 2 years, I decided that a website wouldn’t cut it, so we had to make an app (it took me some time).
In 2013, Columize became a feedly-based RSS reader with an integrated curation tool. You would have a list of RSS feeds and could “curate” items to your “columns” and add a short and sweet comment. Other people could subscribe to your columns and curate stuff from your columns to theirs.
We started development with a remote team in Germany, but it didn’t work out that well. I had 0 experience talking to developers, I was studying Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE) in Warwick, I had no clue about the Apple HIG, I was just blogging about random stuff and wanted to enhance my experience. But I set out to build this because it was more fun than Hegel and Marx.

For fun, here’s a sample of our popovers and modal windows:

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