a) It looks awesome!
b) I generally agree with Trevor's notes.
c) having a search box at the top is a GREAT idea -- this should be able
to filter threads quickly and help find specific things. I use the
equivalent in Gmail all the time.
A few more notes:
* the collapse/expand is only available at the top level, which can make
it hard to really navigate through deeply nested long conversations --
especially if you were only interested in new content
* the appears-on-hover "(board * contributions)" links are hard to
discover and use on a touchscreen (for instance an iPad or other tablet
that gets the desktop interface by default)
* I really want the entire thread title to be clickable as
expand/collapse, not just the little arrow. Much easier on touch, but I
also tried to click on the title portion with my mouse on my laptop. :)
* The input box should probably expand to fit longer input paragraphs, if
possible (at least up to some reasonable size). Right now it's hard to edit
a long response.
* Paging or infinite scroll need to be planned for for really long talk
pages.
I agree that the "find new items" case isn't really handled well at this
stage; there seems to be no "read/unread" distinction and scrolling through
an entire thread to look for new things is very labor-intensive, especially
on touch.
If already-seen entries were initially collapsed like in a Gmail
conversation view.... a long discussion could be waaaay easier to zip
through.
Separate 'list of threads' and 'list of items in a thread' may also
simplify things, as Trevor suggests, when many threads are present.
-- brion
On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 4:05 PM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
First off, it's really awesome to have
mockups and prototypes being done
in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. This prototype is really cool and fun to play with.
I know there are bugs and whatnot, but you've done a great job putting this
together and I look forward to seeing more prototyping like this in the
future.
A couple of things jumped out at me while I used it, hopefully some of
this stuff is useful and new feedback.
- The affordance for expand and collapse (a chevron symbol pointing
right or down) didn't look like a control to me. I think that using symbols
as buttons without outlining them is a great way to make the design
lightweight, but if you make the symbol too big it looks more like a
decoration and less like a control.
- I think it's a good idea to be conservative about how many buttons
to show, and I'm doubtful that an icon will convey "expand" or
"collapse"
very well, but the combined expand/collapse all button gets users into
limbo states and can be a little confusing. Since items can be manually
expand and collapsed, users can end up in a state where everything is
expanded yet the button says "expand all". GMail uses an intermediate state
for their select all button to show that you are in a partial selection
state. Other interfaces often have both buttons always available. My
impression is actually that this is a symptom of a larger problem (see next
point).
- This is not a paged interface, but users are given the ability to
perform actions on "all" items. What does "all" mean in this
context? If
it's setup as infinite scroll then "all" is especially ambiguous. If
it's
paged (maybe the prototype just doesn't show the paging yet) then where are
pages cut off at?
- Because of the expand-in-place design, It feels labor intensive to
navigate through this list. When fully expanded it's really long, and when
collapsed it's tedious to get my mouse on the expand button each time to
open it up, and then have to mind where the thread ends and the next begins.
- There are 2 modes of access I think are most valuable; checking
what's new or reading an entire thread. The way this information is
organized; both directionally how topics at the top are the newest yet
posts at the bottom are the newest and structurally how topics are expanded
in place rather than descended into; doesn't really lend
it'self particularly well to either. It either takes a lot of digging to
find the bits that are new, or it takes a lot of scanning and scrolling to
read a conversation. Perhaps there could be 2 ways to view this
information. One, an activity list, would show what's new only, like tweets
are displayed, with links to see each message in context. The other, a
topic list, would have separate topic and thread views that the user moves
between horizontally (similar to navigation in iOS mail.
That's all I have for now. Again, it's really awesome that this is
interactive and browser-based. I'm confident the final product will be
better for it.
- Trevor
On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Brandon Harris <bharris(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
I have thrown together an interactive prototype of Flow. It's
fairly functional and I intend to make it even more so.
You can play with it here:
http://elohim.gaijin.com/flow/
Nothing is saved to disk. You can reply to topics or even add
new ones but on refresh everything reverts to state.
Right now, the "you" you are logged into is "Jorm" but
I'll be
adding functionality to handle that.
In the sidebar are a couple links to various "board examples":
* Fully Chaos (everything is generated randomly.)
* Jimmy Wales
* Maggie Dennis (Moonriddengirl)
* Me
* A single topic (this is what you get to if you
get an echo notification)
Speaking of, if you click the echo badge, and then click on the
unread notification, you'll get the experience of the user getting a reply
and going to the single conversation view.
You can also click the "Feed" link and you'll be brought to your
feed. The "feed" view is different from the "Board" view. The feed
is
private - it's all the conversations that you my be interested in or are
subscribed to (have a solid star). You also see activity from the boards
of *people* you're subscribed to as well, but it floats away fairly quickly
if you don't subscribe to it.
Known bugs:
* The "New Topic" dialog doesn't close when you click
the "X" button. No idea why; it worked the other day and now it doesn't.
* Some of the conversations are threaded weird. This is
an artifact of the JSON.
* The tab highlights are a bit goofy.
Upcoming:
* The search functionality will work
* You'll be able to add and edit tags
* Stuff like archive/split/whatever
* Edit your own post, etc.
Please share your thoughts.
---
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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