September

This month has been mostly about working through various community suggestions and minor bugs. Main focus has been on the Dashboard Series Access as well as Chapters v3.

Check out the Changelog for the full list of changes, as most of it is not really mentioned below ->

Series Details Access from Dashboard

First of all, I'd like to talk about the most noticeable change from last month - the Dashboard now linking to the Series Details page instead of your tracked source. I know some of you have been surprised and confused by this change, so let me give you more context.

This has actually been planned for years and has been requested many times. Originally, Kenmei didn't have any information of its own, so since day one we linked you directly to the source - that's where you'd find everything like synopsis, genres, and chapter counts.

As Kenmei's data grew and we started providing more and more information ourselves, visiting the source became less and less necessary. We now provide complete synopses (we're actually on track to have more series with descriptions than any other tracking platform!), plus tags, publication status, and more. Not to mention the quality of data being leagues ahead as we review each and every series.

After confirming that most users had stopped visiting the source anyway, I thought it was a good time to make the change. Which brings us to today - clicking on a series title now takes you to Series Details instead of the tracked source. But don't worry, you can still access the source link easily from the action buttons if you need it for any reason.

Mobile Actions

Desktop Actions

However, it turned out that many of you using Kenmei on your phones were blindsided by this change - specifically when trying to access the next chapter to read. To my surprise, not everyone knew that clicking on the badges (Your Last Read and Last Released) would navigate you directly to those chapters. As most on desktop were navigating to last read chapter and then clicking next, I haven't realized that not being quite the case on mobile.

Alas, as a result, I've decided to change priorities and start working on a highly requested, long-awaited feature to address this problem for mobile users. Which brings us to the next section...

Chapters v3

I am happy to announce I've started working on the next evolution of the Chapters Access and Navigation. Taking as basis the 2 most requested features - Ability to navigate to the Next Chapter and Easy Increment / Decrement of chapters - this new version will incorporate all the feedback over the years to make not only tracking, but also jumping into the next chapters super easy.

As it stands, the chapter navigation experience is worst on mobile. Kenmei has always been a desktop-first application, but in recent years mobile users have skyrocketed and now make up the majority of you.

With that in mind, I'm going to start with mobile Grid Mode first, before moving onto List Mode and then eventually both modes on Desktop. There's still a lot of work to do, but I'm hoping to have at least the mobile version ready by the end of the month.

New Categories

One minor update is the next expansion of categories. I've added 3 new highly requested tags - Male Protagonist, Female Protagonist and Regression (till now we used Reincarnation tag for these cases).

Moreover, there is a new category, which is called Content Warning. Some would like to avoid sensitive topics, so these are now prominently displayed, helping you avoid series that might be upsetting. Specifically, Gore, Torture and Suicide themes been added. With additional ones planned for the future.

📈 Progress Overview

My plan for this month was mostly to work on highly requested features, adjust the onboarding experience, and then move onto Importing. But as mentioned above, I've pivoted to working on Chapters v3 instead.

This will be my main focus, which is likely to take 1 or 2 months to complete. There are some adjacent improvements to be made as well, which I'll be working on at the same time.

I still plan to move onto Importing after that, but I also have some other mobile UI improvements I'd like to make based on the past couple of months of research into the biggest frustrations for new members.

Here is the updated list of priorities:

1. Chapters v3

2. Importing

3. Mobile UX improvements

4. Adding other highly requested features

5. New Supported Sites

6. Expanding Data (e.g. new tags)