When we started building Silk, the goal was to create a first-class data publishing platform. Just as YouTube and Tumblr made it easy for non-techies to publish content on the web, Silk has done the same for non-techies wanting to publish structured data.
Today we are taking a big step forward. After much feedback from the Silk creator community (thanks everyone!), we are excited to present a major Silk upgrade that features an entirely new user experience. This isn’t a mere facelift; it’s more like a bionic reconstruction. Watch the video below to see the new Silk, or log in to your Silk account to see what has changed.
As of today, every Silk is entirely responsive and mobile friendly. So you can now view and browse any Silk easily on your iPhone or Android device. (Check out a few featured Silks on our home page on your phone to see how this works). The new Silk is also easier to navigate with bright tabs and more intuitive flows. Building visualizations in Silk is now simpler, and Silk’s visualization recommendations are smarter. Lastly, we made Silk more user-friendly by adding improved tutorials and in-line step-by-step guides for data imports, visualizations, and page creation.
Here is a list of the improvements:
100% Responsive and mobile-friendly: All Silk pages and datacards are now responsive and work well on mobile devices or tablets. The layout, visualizations, and images will adapt according to your screen size. Silk menus and navigation features have also been optimized to work for mobile users on smaller screens.
Smarter visualizations: After importing data, Silk will automatically suggest a visualization. We’ve also added a large green ‘Publish’ button to help you easily insert the visualization onto your homepage, or into another page.
Introducing datacards and big colorful navigation tabs: One of the driving goals of this redesign was to make Silks clearer to navigate and easier to use, both for visitors and creators. So we made some key changes in this area that are tightly linked.
We introduced a clear distinction between pages that contain structured data (which we call datacards), and pages that present and visualize the data in your Silk. This separation makes Silk easier to navigate and understand both for creators and users.
New colorful tabs at the top of the page let you quickly navigate pages and datacards in your Silk. The 'Explore’ tab lets you quickly build visualizations of your data as maps, charts, galleries, or sortable tables.
Easier Silk creation and data imports: Silk creators now get step-by-step help during data imports, during manual data entry, and during the creation of their first visualizations. You can jump into and out of the tutorial flow as you like.
Naturally, we revamped our tutorials on creating a basic Silk, importing spreadsheets, and other articles on silk.co/help to make it easier for you learn how to use the new Silk.
We hope you like the new Silk user experience as much as we do and we can’t wait to hear your feedback.