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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