On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Brandon Harris bharris@wikimedia.orgwrote:
I'm responding to everybody in this single mail, but first: There is a new version at http://elohim.gaijin.com/flow/ This is what's changed: * Posts are automatically marked read as you scrollthrough them. * Unread posts are significantly called out (green headers, experimental - this is fairly obnoxious but you are warned) * Topic titles are now hot * Rudimentary search functionality - Loading throbber - case insensitive - DOES NOT tokenize - searches titles, authornames, tags, postcontent * Clicking the gear icon now brings up a menu * Clicking the subscribe/unsubscribe stars now do things * Clicking the tag icon now opens a small dialog (that doesn't work yet); * Reply form auto-focuses to the textarea now.
Good iteration. :)
FWIW, on some of the smaller design issues like the chevron, I think you're using the right interaction, it just needs a little visual polish to make it easier to use. Same goes for the green color on unread/read state: that saturated color is jarring, but that is overall a good direction for indicating state. This is the nature of prototypes.
I have to say, especially in full chaos mode or the Jimmy Wales board I find the indenting to be quite hard to scan and read. One solution is to consider reducing to one indent level for all replies. The other direction we could go in is removing some of the heavier UI elements, and doing a progressive display of reply buttons and other actions on a post as you focus on it. I find multi-level indenting for threads is only really easy to scan when you have* a lot* of whitespace around blocks, ala Hacker News or our current style of indenting in MediaWiki, so reducing some of many elements on the page would help me scan more. The difficulty scanning might also in part be due to the fixed width of the prototype.
I still am confused about the feed and board model though, to be honest. Aren't notifications supposed to be an easy way to solve for the "tracking conversations" issue? The board is obvious in that it looks and behaves generally like all discussion systems in a broad sense, but when I look at the feed it's not really clear to me what it's comprised of (it looks at first glance just like a board) or why I need to go there, rather than just look for a notification about a reply to me. It's also obviously duplicating my watchlist in a big way.