V1.3 - Numerical Filters, Sorting, Error Handling
Better visualizations to numerical filters, the ability to sort by results, and our first pass at error handling
Hello Beta Users!
We just shipped a big update!
Histograms on Numeric Filters
Show affected parts on Filter Values
Sort by Specs
Deprecated parts
Improvements to AI model, speed and error handling
Histograms on Numeric Filters
Numeric filters have bothered us for years, as existing tools list everything in strings that make it tedious to search and set exactly what you’re looking for, forcing you instead to scroll and multi-select. Plus, it’s impossible to know what value’s are common, so it’s easy to back yourself into a design corner by picking target specs that are uncommon and thus hard to find.
To fix this, we cleaned up the numerical strings (can’t believe they didn’t do this decades ago 🙄), and turned the results into a histogram so you can easily visualize the options! This is a very different approach, so we’d love feedback on what you like and what we could improve!
Dynamically updated Filter Values
Whenever I’m looking for parts, I spend way too much time looking through filters to see what I could possibly use to narrow things down. Rather than ‘guess and check’, we’ve added a count to every filter, and every value within that filter, so you can see how many parts would be affected if you set that filter. Furthermore, these counts are responsive to selections in other filters, so you can understand all the implications before clicking “apply” to reduce the results.
Sort by Specs
We now allow users to sort by whatever spec they prefer! Just click the parameter to change the sort direction. Doing this removes the “AI rankings”, but we’ll figure out how to navigate that in the future!
Deprecated Parts
Previously we were surfacing ALL components in our results, regardless of whether they were active, end of life, etc. That was causing a lot of confusion, so we’ve removed ALL deprecated parts for the time being. We’ll add them back in a future update when we can give you back control for those rare times when you DO want to see parts that you can’t (or shouldn’t) purchase 😇
Core Improvements to AI, load times, and error handling
Thank you to everyone for battling through countless crashes on the V1.0, where ~50% of searches were ‘bugging out’. This was caused by a myriad of factors, but mostly uncaught exemptions from the AI timing out and “failing silently”. We haven’t fixed all of these, but we’ve caught a lot, and have updated things to at least provide feedback when the issue is on our end, rather than just loading forever….
On that note, we’ve made some updates to the AI model as well. It still struggles with long, lengthy queries, particularly when they contain ‘fluff’ input like “Can you help me find….”, “I’m looking for something small”.
We’re working hard to make ANY kind of query work, but for best results now, stick to short, technical information and avoid superlatives like “most, smallest, cheapest, fastest, best, etc”. We’ll get there eventually though!
What’s next!
We are working on a ton of things, but at the top of pipeline is:
Re-introducing interactive datasheet functionality
Adding pricing and availability information from a 3rd party
Improving the AI model to go even deeper into the datasheet information from the search page
If you have any suggestions on what you think we should be working on, please drop me an email, i’d love to get it on our roadmap!
Cheers,
Brandon and the Zenode team
