+ design-l
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
The more I think about it, the more I think, in its current state mobile should not collapse sections by default. If you really want to find a lower section, scrolling down the page and being able to collapse a section to see the next one is easy, yet if you just want to read the article in its entirety it is annoying to have to click to expand a section.
Since we currently load all the HTML for the content of a page it seems silly to hide it (although we should certainly rethink this if we ever begin to lazy load sections)
We ran event logging on toggling a while back [1] and the data showed as you got down the page, it was less likely a section would be toggled opened and read.
I would propose we keep toggling enabled but change the default of all sections to be open rather than closed.
This also removes the existing risk of a flash of unstyled content and enables the ability for users to do find on this page.
We should at least run some kind of A/B test that rethinks this.
Thoughts?
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Event_logging/Mobile#Section_toggles
On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
The more I think about it, the more I think, in its current state mobile should not collapse sections by default. If you really want to find a lower section, scrolling down the page and being able to collapse a section to see the next one is easy, yet if you just want to read the article in its entirety it is annoying to have to click to expand a section.
Well, to me that's a good argument for continuing to collapse (or otherwise avoid rendering) the lower sections -- they're less likely to be read at all, so why waste CPU time and bandwidth on them? My typical Wikipedia inquiries are resolved primarily by the first paragraph or infobox, and maybe skimming one or two sections whose titles sounded relevant...
Of course since we're transferring the text data anyway, it may not save much resources to just collapse/hide the text as we do now. Smarter behavior on lazy-loading of images might accomplish the bandwidth goals even better...
Another thing to consider is that if we don't collapse the intermediate sections, and we don't also devise an alternate table of contents, people may never get to the later sections because it takes a LOT of scrolling to get to them. Yes, you can collapse each section one by one and not have to scroll much, but that strikes me a more difficult interaction to discover than expanding each section in turn...
Def worth investigating. :)
-- brion