Replacing Raw Sentiment Labels with User-Friendly Text on Arifa Landing Page

2026-05-02-replacing-raw-sentiment-labels-with-user-friendly-text-on-ar.md

title	Replacing Raw Sentiment Labels with User-Friendly Text on Arifa Landing Page
date	2026-05-02
author	pmutua
tags	astro cloudflare-workers hono d1 drizzle kv r2 rag workers-ai vectorize turborepo typescript
commit	8055fbc
type	dev-diary

The Hook

I've made some significant changes to the Arifa landing page, focusing on improving user experience by replacing raw sentiment labels with more user-friendly text. This change aims to make the platform more accessible and easier to understand for its users.

Context

Arifa is an AI-powered news aggregation, analysis, and distribution platform catering to Kenya and global tech & science news. The project utilizes a range of technologies including Astro, Cloudflare Workers, and TypeScript, among others. The recent updates are part of the ongoing effort to refine the user interface and enhance the overall user experience.

What Changed

The primary change involves replacing the raw sentiment labels (positive, negative, neutral, mixed) on the landing page with more descriptive and user-friendly text. For instance, "positive" is now displayed as "📈 Good outlook", "negative" as "📉 Concerning", "neutral" as "➖ Factual", and "mixed" as "⚖️ Mixed signals". This change is reflected in both the web/src/pages/dashboard/story.astro and web/src/pages/index.astro files.

const sentimentLabel: Record<string, string> = {
  positive: '📈 Good outlook',
  negative: '📉 Concerning',
  neutral: '➖ Factual',
  mixed: '⚖️ Mixed signals',
};

Additionally, the version of the project has been updated to 0.10.2 as part of the release preparation.

Challenges

No specific challenges were mentioned in the commit messages related to these changes.

What I Learned

• The importance of user-friendly interfaces in enhancing user experience.
• How small changes in labeling can significantly impact how information is perceived and understood by users.

What's Next

These changes are part of the broader effort to continuously improve Arifa's user interface and experience. Future updates will likely focus on further refinements and expansions of the platform's capabilities.

erDiagram
    SENTIMENT-LABELS {
        string positive "Good outlook"
        string negative "Concerning"
        string neutral "Factual"
        string mixed "Mixed signals"
    }
    ARTICLE {
        string title
        string summary
        SENTIMENT-LABELS sentiment
    }
    LANDING-PAGE {
        ARTICLE[] articles
    }
    LANDING-PAGE ||--o{ ARTICLE : displays

Loading

This change enables a more intuitive and engaging experience for Arifa's users, making it easier for them to understand the sentiment behind the news articles presented on the platform.

---

Git Provenance

All commits are SSH-signed (Ed25519) and show a Verified badge on GitHub. The source repository is private — commit URLs are not publicly accessible.

Commit	Date	Message	Verified
e035249	2026-05-02 02:24 +03:00	fix(web): replace raw sentiment labels with user-friendly text on landing page	✓
2a115df	2026-05-02 02:26 +03:00	chore(root): prepare release 0.10.2	✓
8055fbc	2026-05-02 02:38 +03:00	Merge pull request #25 from pmutua/release/0.10.2	✓