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@wikimedia.org> 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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