Let me explain why, after seeing usernames-on-top for the first time at Hummingbird, over time I came to believe that this is a superior layout.
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Name length has been a huge problem for us from the beginning. Even with 15 char max usernames, the same as Twitter, we can barely fit long/wide usernames in the left gutter. @sam came up with arcane splitting heuristics to get names to be on two lines that helped, but seemed awfully hacky.
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The bigger you make the left gutter, the less room there is for everything else. And other than badges, which will be glyphs or images, there is nothing useful to put in the left gutter. So other than a little flourish at the top with the avatar and 1 or 2 lines of text, the left gutter is empty space the rest of the time. Some whitespace is good, sure, but a giant set of whitespace to accommodate the rare ultra-wide username MMMMMAXIMUM is not helping anyone.
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Choosing and showing titles for some users exacerbates the problem (a little).
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Enabling the optional display of long names for each user exacerbates the problem a lot.
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Choosing intentionally short usernames (15 char max) like Twitter began to feel like a long term mistake I did not want cast in stone for V1. Sure, you want somewhat short unique names so the typing and display of them doesn’t get unwieldy, but 15 chars gets a lot of pushback from communities because it is so short. I think something like 20 chars is much more realistic – and there’s NO way we could do that with the left gutter name approach. We can barely get 15 chars to work!
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It’s even worse on expanded replies and in-reply-to since the width is even narrower there!
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Trying the username-on-top layout on folksy felt very, very good and natural. I was surprised how much I liked the flow with the username on top. Maybe because that’s how Twitter does it, and a bunch of other chat clients I use?
The more I think about it, the more I believe that there is just no question that username-on-top is the correct long term model for Discourse. It solves so, so many problems we had.