Ameliorate Update 5/15/25: Socializing
Ameliorate is a tool for critically thinking about problems and collaboratively refining our understanding of them.
TLDR
- Refined homepage to better convey goals & what the app is
- Spent a good chunk of time looking for possible usage, reaching out, posting around
- Reorganized app interface & made a few quality-of-life improvements (see demo !)
- Next: simple/mobile-friendly view, more quality-of-life improvements, suggestions & approvals?
Greetings, and welcome to another round of Ameliorate updates! 🙂
What I’ve been doing
Most of the focus since last time has been on socializing Ameliorate - improving the home page, looking for places the tool could be useful, reaching out to people, posting about it.
There’s been some interest in the realm of legislation - using Ameliorate to break down bills in a way that’s easily understandable, so that they’re more accessible to citizens, and potentially citizens can even help refine them! I’m excited about the possibilities here 🔥.
I’ve also been thrilled about recent activity in the Ameliorate Discord server ! There have been a lot of great discussions, lots of good ideas for features I hadn’t thought of, lots of considerations I hadn’t thought of. It’s been really helpful for me to discuss specifics of the tool more, and I feel like I’ve gained significant insights about the tool and its possibilities.
There have been some code contributions from others , too! I was inspired to classify a few “Good Second Issues” as a stepping stone between Good First Issues and more challenging issues, and I’m pretty happy with this as a path for new contributors.
Aside from these things, I’ve taken some time to make various quality-of-life improvements. Let’s take a look!
App updates
If you prefer to watch the latest updates rather than read, check out the demo video !
Reorganized app interface
Previously, there were a couple annoying things about the interface:
- There was an option to turn indicators on/off, but when they were on, the interface was more cluttered than it needed to be
- The topic’s title wasn’t called out very well
- It was hard to find the topic’s Quick Views, which are the topic author’s intended way of viewing a topic
- There were two headers, pushing the diagram a bit off-center vertically
I shuffled the interface around a little bit in attempts to address these things, check it out:
Cleaning up home page + added examples
I felt like the old homepage was a little hectic and didn’t do a great job of communicating Ameliorate’s goals and what it does, so I updated a few sections. I won’t show it all here, but you can check it out yourself . One big thing I will show is the new section for showing off a few use cases along with example topics:
Some more docs: pilot testing + breakdown process
I wanted to make an obvious request for feedback, while also providing an opportunity for people to ease into using Ameliorate, with guidance from me if that’d help! So I made a simple pilot testing program for exactly this. I also created a breakdown process page to explain how I generally go about breaking down problems, using various “phases” to focus on different aspects of the problem(s)/solution(s), one at a time.
Feel free to reach out if you’re interested in participating with some hands-on guidance! 🙂
Misc
Mitigation nodes
There’s a new node type! This was added as a way to distinguish solutions that aren’t exactly “core” solutions, whose main purpose is to mitigate a concern. It seems to be working well for now; I’ll be keeping an eye out for whether or not it continues to seem valuable enough to keep as a distinct node type.
Show/hide options
Previously, one option was added to show/hide a bunch of indicators. But often-times you want only some to show, and not others! So some fine-grained control has been added for which indicators to show:
Zen mode
As an effort to add more ways to reduce clutter, the Zen mode option has been added, which hides the various auxiliary aspects of the interface:
Details tabs
Another effort to make the interface easier to navigate was adding tabs for each section of the details pane. I’m not totally sold on it yet, so it’s just a configuration option for now.
What’s next?
Next up, there are a lot of small quality-of-life improvements I want to make. A lot of these are ideas or things that came up in recent discourse sessions , or from the great Discord discussions I mentioned earlier. You can check out the current state of the backlog (next update is Update #7). I’ve actually got so many improvements that I want to make that I’ve started slotting some of them for the update after the next one!
The biggest thing I’m working on for the next update is an interface that’s simpler - particularly easier to use on mobile. This is something that should be useful for the legislation realm, so people can conveniently get a bill breakdown (and potentially help refine it) from their phones, where many people get their news and would read about bills. I’ve got a million different designs already , and I think they’re slowly getting closer to something useful 😄. Let me know if you have any ideas!
After that, the big thing I want to do is allow people to make suggestions on other people’s topics, and for those other people to be able to approve them. It’s very unlikely that I make much progress on this before the next update, but there’s a chance.
That’s all for this time!
Cheers 🙂
Understand ourselves. Understand each other. Grow together.
Ameliorate.