Yeah, I was pushing for putting a stationary Table of Contents in the right rail for a while. The thing that changed my mind and made me like having the fixed header ToC was having the title of the topic that you're reading at the top of the page. That feels internally consistent -- there's one place on the page that shows where you are, and gives you a place to navigate from. It feels right to me. Here are a couple screenshots from the current version as we're building it, so you can see what I mean.

The empty right rail is something that's been on my mind for a while. We're either going to put something useful there, or allow people to choose a wider layout, or both.


Danny
 

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 2:44 PM, Hhhippo ... <hhhipppo@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Pau,

This looks great! A bit like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hhhippo/Flow/TOC_and_filters , just with a filter I didn't think of yet. I really like the idea. A few comments anyway:

As I said already at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Flow/Table_of_Contents_spec , this TOC layout looks very much like the usual MediaWiki TOC on mobile. On a desktop/laptop screen a TOC that overlaps the board while the right half of the browser window is completely empty looks just wrong.

I like the little indicator bar showing where the results are. In the final version, will the dark grey bar showing the current position be limited in width to the currently displayed range? One could also think of putting it vertically next to the actual scroll bar and using the slider as position indicator, but that might be difficult with infinite scrolling. Or an additional medium grey region indicating parts that are loaded, but not on the screen right now (kinda YouTube-style)?

If one scrolls down to a search result far down on a long board, a lot of topics have to be loaded. Maybe there should be a way to load and show only topics with hits?

I can't think of any cases where your concept wouldn't work right now. What will surely come up at some time is searching for wikimarkup used when composing a post. This might be quite expensive if the markup is not in the database, but that's not really the topic here.

Best wishes
Hhhippo




On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 7:48 PM, Pau Giner <pginer@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi all,

I created a prototype to illustrate some of the concepts for searching a flow board:

The basic ideas are:
  • Show first result as soon as you type and avoid context changes (i.e., highlighting the matches on top of the current conversation instead of going through a specific "results page")
  • Integrate search with table of contents. The table of contents can act as a de-facto search results summary you can open after searching to have an overview of the topics where your query was found (and information on whether some of these topics were in your watchlist or you participated in them).

Note that the prototype is intended to reflect the basic interaction elements so several aspects are missing or broken. It also simulates a limited workflow, so you may want to follow these instructions:
  1. This is a flow board about the Rapa Nui article. Please, access the list of all topics and go back to the flow board (the prototype won't let you jump to a specific topic).
  2. Search for "moai" to find out which conversations are related to those nice statues.
    1. You can go through the results by the next/previous controls or by scrolling.
  3. While you are searching, get an overview on which topics are related to your search.

Feel free to provide any feedback. At this moment we are specially interested in usecases for search where this model may not work, so examples to illustrate those would be really useful.


Thanks

Pau


--
Pau Giner
Interaction Designer
Wikimedia Foundation

_______________________________________________
EE mailing list
EE@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee



_______________________________________________
EE mailing list
EE@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee