Explore Vox card stacks

During April, our product team spent the month focused on a litany of small fixes, necessary improvements to the site, and different tools for the editorial team as they settled into telling stories every day.

In our second month, we were able to shift our focus back to site building and big picture planning. Today, you’ll see the result of that work, and the first big addition to the site: our card stack hub and explore card.

If you visit Vox.com/cardstacks or go to any card stack and click to the final page, you’ll find a search bar that will access any of the 81 card stacks the team has built out since launch, covering topics as wide ranging as Shakespeare, Medicaid, sexual assault on campuses and Obamacare. If we haven’t written on a topic, you can submit your search term to the editorial team. We’ll keep track of those submissions and work to tackle the topics you want to know about.

We took a gamble with the card stacks at launch. They were an idea we weren’t sure people would respond to, in a style that went against the grain of the scroll layout design. But people are reading them, and moving from one card to the next in the stack. And Vox writers have done a great job of finding big topics to break down. I’ve learned a lot from them. I hope you have too.

What we didn’t have at launch, though, was a great way of giving readers access to all our card stacks. Hence the idea for this explore hub. We want people to be able to pull up a topic they want to know about right now. And the work we put into it will inform other future plans, of which there are many.

One personal plan: I will be updating this story stream more regularly, and having more of the discussions I had yesterday with readers about homepage design. We’ve gotten some great insight from our readers. Thank you for helping us shape this site.

It’s been a busy two months, and it’ll keep being busy, but it’s starting to feel like we’re settling into a groove. It’s a good feeling.

Time to update the version tracking: let’s call this Vox 1.2.