First, thanks so much for this! I started shuffling categories on my Discourse install again and realised the parent category > child category display of hashtags in text was really niggling at me again (we have lots of categories and we mention our categories and subcategories a lot to guide our users around). So I checked back to see if things had moved forward since our first discussions about this, and it has! So happy.
I personally wouldnât have needed the cards (just the more concise subcategory link) but on second thought I quite liked the idea. At least for my population of users, being able to see a preview of a category or hashtag really makes sense. I did, however, imagine it as a hover", and when I realised it was on clic my reaction was âoh wait, what, another step? double-clicking on hyperlinks?!â
This was exactly my reaction: weâre just adding an extra click to open a link⌠meh.
But then I tried it on my phone and changed my mind: the card gives me a really good overview of what the category is (if I had any doubts⌠remembering that people using a taxonomy generally find it less intuitive than those who came up with it) and gives me a hint of what the latest posts are, which actually gives me a chance to not head over to that tag or category if it wasnât what I wanted.
My users are not that comfortable in digital spaces and get lost. This is definitely, as I see it, going to help them not lose track of where they are, not end up somewhere they didnât really want to be because they clicked on a few words that looked promising to them but werenât actually the right call.
So, right now, quite enthusiastic and have enabled the preview for my community. Weâll see how it works in practice.
But⌠I can imagine other community scenarios where this would not work. I agree that we donât want to make everything a setting (weâre already drowning in them, I complained about that enough). But⌠I feel this does âbreakâ the expected pattern of how things work online: click on a link, get taken to the destination. Type a hashtag, that means people can click on it to see everything related to that hashtag. So Iâm not really sure what the way around this is.
Perhaps the solution is on another level, in how Discourse as a tool deals with two apparently conflicting intentions:
- be very flexible and customizable
- offer a great experience âout of the boxâ
The team might already be on this (or this might be an idea that doesnât work, or maybe Iâm stating the obvious, or late to the game, or beside the point or displaying my ignorance of how things work) but it seems to me that the âsolutionâ to reconcile the two is:
- be ruthless in making decisions about UX/functionalities for the âbasic, out-of the box, plug-and-playâ experience
- be ruthless in paring down options and settings to cover 95% of use cases (or is it 80%? 99%? whatever %)
- offer a second layer of settings for power-users or edge-cases and people who want to tweak very specific stuff; this wouldnât be integrated in the interface that provides the ânormalâ settings, but probably more config-file-like
So in this case, if the teamâs conclusion is that hashtag/category preview cards are the way to go, and that subcategories should display inline without mentioning the parent category, and that there isnât sufficient justification to make this a general admin setting, it could still be a âhidden settingâ accessible by adding âhashtag_preview_cards: OFFâ or âshow_hashtag_subcategory_parent_inline: ONâ somewhere.
Writing this, Iâm pretty sure there are dev implications in addition to UX regarding the multiplication of settingsâŚ