Please see the screenshot, it explains the issue:
1 Like
Hey there, if you click on each of the user assignments from the screenshot, does it lead to a different post?
3 Likes
I just tested it now, and yes it does.
But it does not make it any better.
It is absolutely confusing and meaningless to see the same name three times in a row, and everyone in our team thinks it is a bug.
If you want to make three links to the three posts that are all assigned to the same user, then make each clickable item in the list visually distinct. For example, mention the user name once only, and then list post numbers, each clickable (e.g. #2,#23,#51). Alternatively, say “Slava (3)”, and have up/down arrows to the right of it, that will move you to the previous/next message assigned to Slave as you click on them.
The way it is presented now, it makes no sense whatsoever, and is counterintutive. It just looks like a bug.
Moreover, if your goal is to show all of them at the top, then also highlight the one that I just clicked and navigated to. What if there are 5, and I just clicked on the second one, then I read it, and now I want to click on the next one. But by the time I finished reading, I forgot which one I clicked, was it second? Which one should I click next - is it third? It is impractical the way it is implemented now.
Believe it or not, this is something our team has mentioned before, as we are also heavy users of the assign plugin here on meta.
The conclusion we ended up with was something more fundamental – large topics deserve to be broken down into smaller ones for better future-proofing and traceability. Having many post assignments tends to be a symptom of hygiene for us.
With topics over 20-30 posts and assignments to various posts, readers tend to lose context themselves. Another thing I’ve seen us moving towards is that we tend to collapse all the work into a checklist on the first post, and favour topic assignments instead of post assignments.
Do be rest assured that the team will take your feedback as well.
1 Like
I had no idea that I could assign individual posts rather than the topic as a whole. I only found out about it from the responses in this topic here at Meta. If there is such a setting, I’d entirely turn individual post assignments off and only leave topic assignments.
I had a good usability feedback when I implemented up/down arrows to navigate between specific items in a longer list — worth considering this ui if you’re exploring ui improvement options.
Also note my other topic where I suggest adding a way to see all checkboxes from a topic in a single list. This comes from the idea that as you discuss something for a long time, you build a list of smaller todo things as you go. It’s very impractical to always go up to the beginning of the topic and edit it and add todo items with checkboxes. It’s much easier to add a checkbox in a message as the discussion happens, and then have the checklist to be formed and kept up to date and in sync somewhere (maybe in the first post!). So think of it as auto-TOC but for checkboxes.