Hey everyone,
Monte, Yuvi, Danny (PM for Flow) and I met today to discuss our way forwards with discussions on apps.
The statement of the problem is that the apps currently don't surface discussions at all; both article talk and user talk are not made apparent to the user. This creates problems for power users and new users alike; power users workflows are built around discussions so we serve them poorly, and new users can't interact with anyone, which includes things like new users being unable to read vandalism warnings.
Our solution needs to let people participate meaningfully in discussions, both on article talk pages and also meta-discussions (user talk pages, etc.)
So the question is, do we do a styling pass on talk pages to make them easier to use on the apps and surface those talk pages, or do we just wait for Flow (for some definition of "wait")? We were leaning towards the former, but wanted to make sure we'd considered all the variables before proclaiming we had a solution.
We discussed. We felt that waiting for Flow introduces too many unknowns; Flow will not be deployed to user talk pages for at least six months, which is a long time to wait to get discussions implemented. Even then, it may be even longer before we can reliably say "all discussions are on Flow". We can't afford to wait that long to serve the need for discussions in the app.
*This email in a nutshell: Waiting for Flow is insufficient. We want to do a styling pass on talk pages to make them usable on apps.*
Let me know if you have any questions!
Thanks, Dan
How will this play in with notifications on apps to close the loop?
On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hey everyone,
Monte, Yuvi, Danny (PM for Flow) and I met today to discuss our way forwards with discussions on apps.
The statement of the problem is that the apps currently don't surface discussions at all; both article talk and user talk are not made apparent to the user. This creates problems for power users and new users alike; power users workflows are built around discussions so we serve them poorly, and new users can't interact with anyone, which includes things like new users being unable to read vandalism warnings.
Our solution needs to let people participate meaningfully in discussions, both on article talk pages and also meta-discussions (user talk pages, etc.)
So the question is, do we do a styling pass on talk pages to make them easier to use on the apps and surface those talk pages, or do we just wait for Flow (for some definition of "wait")? We were leaning towards the former, but wanted to make sure we'd considered all the variables before proclaiming we had a solution.
We discussed. We felt that waiting for Flow introduces too many unknowns; Flow will not be deployed to user talk pages for at least six months, which is a long time to wait to get discussions implemented. Even then, it may be even longer before we can reliably say "all discussions are on Flow". We can't afford to wait that long to serve the need for discussions in the app.
This email in a nutshell: Waiting for Flow is insufficient. We want to do a styling pass on talk pages to make them usable on apps.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Thanks, Dan
-- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager for Platform and Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
Mobile web has exactly the same problem. On mobile web in beta mode we have a prototype interface which tries to make the talk pages easy to digest (it basically disects the page into threaded discussions - currently only 1 level deep (although it could be taken further by identifying indents).
Talk pages as they are on desktop are just not mobile friendly. I'm not sure any styling can help... :)
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Tomasz Finc tfinc@wikimedia.org wrote:
How will this play in with notifications on apps to close the loop?
On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hey everyone,
Monte, Yuvi, Danny (PM for Flow) and I met today to discuss our way forwards with discussions on apps.
The statement of the problem is that the apps currently don't surface discussions at all; both article talk and user talk are not made apparent to the user. This creates problems for power users and new users alike; power users workflows are built around discussions so we serve them poorly, and new users can't interact with anyone, which includes things like new users being unable to read vandalism warnings.
Our solution needs to let people participate meaningfully in discussions, both on article talk pages and also meta-discussions (user talk pages, etc.)
So the question is, do we do a styling pass on talk pages to make them easier to use on the apps and surface those talk pages, or do we just wait for Flow (for some definition of "wait")? We were leaning towards the former, but wanted to make sure we'd considered all the variables before proclaiming we had a solution.
We discussed. We felt that waiting for Flow introduces too many unknowns; Flow will not be deployed to user talk pages for at least six months, which is a long time to wait to get discussions implemented. Even then, it may be even longer before we can reliably say "all discussions are on Flow". We can't afford to wait that long to serve the need for discussions in the app.
This email in a nutshell: Waiting for Flow is insufficient. We want to do a styling pass on talk pages to make them usable on apps.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Thanks, Dan
-- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager for Platform and Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
Talk pages as they are on desktop are just not mobile friendly. I'm not sure any styling can help... :)
Styling doesn't just imply changing the CSS. On the Apps we can restructure the HTML too pretty easily
Well mobile web can do this too using JavaScript - for instance we parse a talk page into sections and show the discussion headings, which when clicked show the underlying discussion - it doesn't help much though as talk pages are relatively unpredictable :)
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Yuvi Panda yuvipanda@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
Talk pages as they are on desktop are just not mobile friendly. I'm not sure any styling can help... :)
Styling doesn't just imply changing the CSS. On the Apps we can restructure the HTML too pretty easily
-- Yuvi Panda T http://yuvi.in/blog