I noticed two things about the bookmark reminder that seem like bugs.
Choosing a date for the reminder autosaves and closes the popup. I suppose this could be considered ux, but why have a save button if it autosaves when a “remind me” button is selected?
If I select a preset option like “this weekend” (which autosaves and closes the popup as already mentioned), opening the popup back up shows that custom has been selected. The custom date is correct and matches the selection I made, but I find it strange that it shows up as custom.
I think the ‘save’ option is for setting one without a reminder, and it saves on choosing the date as a time-saver.
And having the original time displaying in the custom box allows you to then push the reminder by whichever increment option you pick, relative to the day/time you edit.
I suppose, but I still find the inconsistency confusing. Some things autosaving and others requiring manual action to save (all in the same popup) is a bit weird to me. Not a big deal, I just thought it worked differently before and got confused. Could just be misremembering though.
I think what’s confusing to me is that there are several options that are given, but then it is always saved as custom. I suppose at a certain point those presets are just there to help you, and always saving it on the backend as a datetime makes sense, but then I wouldn’t expect clicking the presets to save and close the popup. I’d expect the calendar to be the most prominent part of the popup, with smaller “helper” buttons to automatically update the calendar to those presets, but not autosave. Reading your response and thinking about it more does make this feel more like a UX suggestion than a bug though.
What @JammyDodger is saying is correct, these are purposeful UX decisions, we want saving a bookmark and setting a reminder to be as frictionless as possible.
Because you can edit the bookmark to change the name, time, and auto delete options.
This is because the passage of time in most cases for these prefill options makes it impractical to preselect the original option. For example if you choose Tomorrow then wait a day and open the bookmark to edit it, we would need additional logic to figure out whether you chose tomorrow today or some day in the past and preselect the correct option accordingly. Multiply this across all our preselect options, and it’s just easier to bring it back as custom.
Yeah, that’s what I figured and it makes sense. I think the UI is not ideal for that use workflow though. I’m not really good with making mockups or I would make one, but I’m thinking something with the following features from top to bottom:
Input for the name followed by the gear for editing the auto-delete options (same as current).
Input for date and input for time (what is currently behind the “custom date and time” section) which would always be visible. This would make it clearer that date and time are the actual sources of truth rather than the “shortcut” buttons like “tomorrow” or “this weekend”.
Smaller buttons below those inputs for each of the shortcuts, but made less prominent than they currently are. There would be 2-3 side by side. Clicking them would not autosave and close the popup. Rather it would just populate the above date input.
Perhaps add similar shortcuts for time of day. This would help alleviate another flaw with the current design: the assumption that people want the notifications in the morning. Personally, I tend to want the notifications after I complete my normal work day, so in the evenings. The lack of shortcuts for this currently forces me to always use the custom date/time pickers anyway.
Anyway, that’s what I have in mind. I find the current design fairly inconvenient and confusing, and I think something like what I just described would make it simpler to use and more powerful at the same time.
I appreciate your detailed feedback and thoughts on how to improve the modal, though unless others raise similar concerns we are not likely to change it around too much at this time.
We do have “Later Today”, but I see what you are saying. This was also a deliberate choice to guide people down the road of doing things within “work hours”. Perhaps we come up with a user preference or site setting to allow for “This Evening” and “Tonight” presets or something if others have a similar need for it?
Naturally. Just sharing my ideas at this point. No worries if not much changes.
Having all the shortcuts be within “work hours” makes sense for people who are using a given Discourse site for work-related things. But I imagine my use case here can’t be that unusual, where the Discourse site(s) someone uses are not related to their work, and they want to check back outside of work hours to avoid conflicts with their job. (But I don’t know, perhaps most people like this are fine getting notifications in the morning if they don’t bother checking the site until evening anyway. I can’t really speculate on that.)
The main thing for me is the “later today”, “tomorrow”, and “later this week” options. Basically I’d want all of them to be preset for evening (4-6pm range) rather than morning times. So a user preference that basically defaults these to evening instead of morning would work for me. The “later today” option would become “this evening” or “tonight”, and the others would just change their associated times even if the text remains the same.
I understand if this is deemed to be too complicated or not worth it. If so I’ll just keep using the custom date/time section I guess.
EDIT: Instead of a site setting or user preference, it could just be a setting within the gear icon section of the bookmark popup itself. Maybe that still counts as a user preference, I don’t know. But it could potentially simplify things by keeping all the relevant options in one place.
Yeah that’s kind of where we are leaning towards with user preferences these days, putting them near the thing they will actually affect instead of hidden in the user profile. @sam what are your thoughts on the above? We have discussed the default “time of day” preference for a while now for bookmark reminders, perhaps it’s time to add it.
Latest thinking and feedback is that it kind of makes sense to have this in “both” places. Cause there is something discoverable about walking all the pages in user prefs.