We had a meeting this afternoon to talk about the Table of Contents for Flow boards -- May and Jared (design), Shahyar and Jon (front-end), Danny (product) and Nick (community).
The purpose of the Table of Contents is to encourage browsing through topic titles for a quick overview of the discussions on the board, and allow quick one-click navigation from one topic to another.
This seems like a simple thing to do, which turns out to be technically more complex than you'd think. :)
The core that I think we're agreed on is that the ToC lives in the right rail on desktop (either fixed on its own, or connected to a fixed sort bar, with an icon replacing the current collapse icon).
The thing we're trying to figure out right now is the UI when a user jumps to a topic that's further ahead than we can easily load at once.
For example: on page load, we load all the posts for topics #1-10. If I scroll down past #10, we lazy-load the next set of topics: #11-20.
So, starting at the topic with #1-10 loaded:
-- If I click on ToC item #5, then I scroll to that topic, easy. -- If I click on ToC item #15, then we lazy-load 11-20 and scroll to 15, easy. -- If I click on ToC item #37....... we have to figure out how to represent the intervening topics without actually loading the full #11-37 all at once.
Shahyar, May and I came up with a possible solution -- loading the intervening topics just as a topic title, similar to our current most-collapsed state.
So if I jump from the top to #37, we've got #1-10 fully displayed, then a list of topics from #11-36, and then I scroll down to #37, which I see in full.
At that point, if I scroll back up from #37, I'll see just the compressed topic titles. I can click on a compressed topic to open it up. If I use the ToC to jump from #37 back up to #28 (which is currently compressed), then I scroll to #28 and it's automatically loaded for me.
That's not perfect, but it's got potential as a next thing to try. May is going to work on some mockups, which we'll look at in the Design check-in meeting on Wednesday.
May's card is here: https://trello.com/c/1Mdiy4Fn
Danny
Danny Horn wrote:
So, starting at the topic with #1-10 loaded: [...] So if I jump from the top to #37, we've got #1-10 fully displayed, then a list of topics from #11-36, and then I scroll down to #37, which I see in full.
I would personally perhaps also load 36 and 38, and load 35/34/etc if the reader scrolls up.
svetlana
I was thinking that, but Shahyar pointed out that lazy-loading content above your current position on the page basically means that you're being pushed down the page as you're trying to scroll up. It's not completely out of the question, but we're going to have to think about how that feels.
On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 8:00 PM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
Danny Horn wrote:
So, starting at the topic with #1-10 loaded: [...] So if I jump from the top to #37, we've got #1-10 fully displayed, then a list of topics from #11-36, and then I scroll down to #37, which I see in full.
I would personally perhaps also load 36 and 38, and load 35/34/etc if the reader scrolls up.
svetlana
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On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 5:05 AM, Danny Horn dhorn@wikimedia.org wrote:
I was thinking that, but Shahyar pointed out that lazy-loading content above your current position on the page basically means that you're being pushed down the page as you're trying to scroll up. It's not completely out of the question, but we're going to have to think about how that feels.
Use case for that: topic 36 is really long and you want to jump to the end of it. You click 38 and then scroll up. Maybe there is a better way to accomplish that though.
Cheers Lydia
We have thought about that use case, but it's an edge case. You'd basically click 36, then click 37 and scroll up a little bit.
--Shahyar
On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 10:44 PM, Lydia Pintscher < lydia.pintscher@wikimedia.de> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 5:05 AM, Danny Horn dhorn@wikimedia.org wrote:
I was thinking that, but Shahyar pointed out that lazy-loading content
above
your current position on the page basically means that you're being
pushed
down the page as you're trying to scroll up. It's not completely out of
the
question, but we're going to have to think about how that feels.
Use case for that: topic 36 is really long and you want to jump to the end of it. You click 38 and then scroll up. Maybe there is a better way to accomplish that though.
Cheers Lydia
-- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Product Manager for Wikidata
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