To clarify, the "zooming" behavior I described is only on the iOS version
of the app presently, but this feature could be added to the list of "new
article styling and presentation possibilities" which would not be possible
with collapsed section nav.
On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 4:37 PM, Monte Hurd <mhurd(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Pine,
Thanks for the feedback on the collapsed vs expanded section navigation
issue! :)
Here's some background about why we went with expanded sections for the
apps:
Somewhat counterintuitively, it was largely because of the example you
gave: really large articles.
This may seem odd. How could keeping the sections expanded make navigating
large articles easier*?
It turns out, with collapsed sections navigation, if you are reading a
long section, you have to scroll repeatedly if you are partway through
reading that section and decide it does not contain what you are looking
for, or you want to read another section. The number of these useless
"extra scrolls" depends on how long the section is, how far you've read
through it, whether the next section you wish to read is above or below the
section you were reading, and how many sections there are in the article.
So "extra scrolls" are no good. But if an article is read from top to
bottom, the reader is not really not doing any "extra scrolls". They're
scrolling as they read and simply tapping the next collapsed section title
to read it.
So what's counterintuitive about collapsed section navigation and large
articles? It's this: the longer the article is, the less likely the user is
going to read it in-order or in its entirety, and in these cases, the
number of "extra scrolls" increases with collapsed section navigation.
This is why we give the user single-tap access to the article table of
contents. With this approach, if they read from top to bottom, nothing has
changed from a swipe count perspective, but we save the user a tap for each
section they read. When the top navigation is scrolled off-screen, as you
had mentioned, we also give the user single-swipe access to the table of
contents. Additionally, when the table of contents appears, it gives you a
"birds-eye" view of the section you had been reading and also
simultaneously scrolls the zoomed out article as you scroll the table of
contents to help you quickly find other parts of the article, whether text,
images or tables, which interest you.
We do need to make it more obvious to users that a single swipe will
reveal the table of contents at any time. We have designs for a little
intro for this which is already implemented on the Android app, and will
soon be on the iOS app as well.
Additionally, not collapsing the sections opens up new article styling and
presentation possibilities which would be confusing from a UX perspective
if sections had to be manually and individually expanded or collapsed.
("in-article search" for example, but there are many more, including
inconsistencies with larger screen tablet presentations)
Did this help make the decision to go with expanded sections make more
sense? Let me know, and thanks again for the feedback!
-Monte
*(For me "easier" came down to how many touch gestures I had to do to find
what I was looking for. So, one tap or swipe gesture was easier than 4 or
6.)
On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 4:22 PM, Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 20 October 2014 09:57, Pine W
<wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
When I am scrolling down a page such as WP:GAB, the navbar at the top of
the page disappears, which takes the TOC icon away with it. I was finding
it easy to get lost in a mass of text when scrolling down the page; hence
my request for collapsed sections. However when I scroll up the navbar
reappears. Can you make the navbar remain visible at all times?
Our app is a reader app like Kindle, but it's also a web browser app like
Chrome. This navbar hiding is a common design pattern on both these kinds
of apps, as it removes the clutter and lets the user focus on long form
reading. Given that the ToC can be summoned by swiping left even if the nav
bar is hidden, and that the user is informed of this in the form of an
onboarding screen the first time they go to a page with a ToC, making the
nav bar persistent would do nothing other than damage our long-form reading
experience.
* Facilitate the viewing of page history within the app
What is the user story for this? "As a reader, I want to view the page
history, so that..."?
> * Allow images to be disabled
This is something we're talking about at the minute. There are a lot of
people out there, particularly on the Android app but also on iOS, that are
on connections that have highly restricted bandwidth. Giving those users a
text only mode would be great.
The real question is, where does the option go? It's an application-level
setting so it should go in the More menu, but I am very *very* reluctant
to go down the road of adding tons of preferences to the app and turning it
into something like the preferences page we have on the desktop site.
We're continuing to think about this.
> * Facilitate easy access to the Refdesk, Teahouse, and other help
> resources for both readers and editors
Many of these pages (like the Reference Desk) look really bad on the
mobile app, and others (like the Teahouse) are demonstrably broken. For
example, the current setup of the Teahouse triggers the browser bounce
behaviour (i.e. often, clicking on links will take you to mobile web) so
we'd need to fix these pages and workflows up before directing users to
them. And, suddenly, this quick fix is a lot of work! I do not want to open
the team up to getting sucked into a black hole of work.
Hopefully this explains our thinking.
Dan
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
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