How I built Hardcover's new homepage: the Dashboard

Phase 1 - four widgets The initial dashboard came with 4 widgets - Currenlty Reading, Goals, Feed and Stats. We had plans to let users choose the sizes of their widgets in the future, so for the first release I chose the sizes so it would neatly work as a 3-column layout on desktop. Beta-testing the widgets Of course in between me merging the initial code and doing a full release to everyone, we did do some beta testing as well. I did this via two avenues: After merging in some code, asking for input from the team on the designs / usability Then doing wider release to our Supporter tier (the lovely people who fund Hardcover by paying us $5/month) and asking for their feedback in Discord We treat early access to features as a Supporter perk, but really I feel like Supporters are almost doing us a service. Everyone always has such great feedback, and also I got a lot of great ideas for new Dashboard widgets and widget settings from them as well. Releasing edit mode and some more widgets…