Design feedback from the perspective of Humane Tech

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@Samuel_Klein

Make titles 90% of the view, rather than 40%.

This seems quite dubious to me – even Google Inbox doesn’t make the title that prominent.

@Samuel_Klein

limit the variation in repeated information like ‘views’ and ‘activity’ (e.g.: clustering to the nearest day or order-of-magnitude)

I’ve mentioned something like this before:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-topics-sorted-primarily-by-category-instead-of-activity/26766/11?u=codinghorror

It is a complex change, though.

@Samuel_Klein

Offer slight variation in background color for the topic titles,

We used to do tiger striping for the topic list in older versions of Discourse, the consensus was that it added more noise than anything else.

@Samuel_Klein

Use color where you expect eyes to go. Don’t have most of the color variation in the user-icons, unless the goal is mainly viewing and clicking on those icons.

That is in fact, the goal – conversations are people, and we want the focus to the be on the people.

@Samuel_Klein

by default don’t let a category take up more than one line in the drop-down menu. That led to us removing most category-description posts, since they make the dropdown less convenient to use.

Which category drop-down are you referring to? Can you provide a screenshot? TL0 users get full category descriptions, and users who have been around longer just get the category title per recent @joffreyjaffeux changes. So this already scales to the user.

@Samuel_Klein

Make the notification visible when someone is looking for it, in a persistent place, but not otherwise. So it shouldn’t show up in the title column at all – it interferes with alignment and linespacing. You could put the blue “{n}” indicator for new posts next to the existing count of the # of replies. You might replace an actual number with one, two, or three tiny dots, for “1-2”, “3-5”, “many” – again on the principle that you don’t want to overwhelm w/ detail.

I think I’d need to see a mockup to understand what you’re getting at here? Nobody has ever complained about our existing notification that “new / updated topics have arrived” as it mimics what Twitter does.

Furthermore, it doesn’t shift anything around, because it overlays the column titles, as you can see here:

@Samuel_Klein

Right now it is an undifferentiated stream that is always disarmingly messy: things never disappear from it, they simply become unhighlighted. Simple: Let people keep notifs clear.

Why? That would remove my ability to quickly revisit something I was recently notified about; I use this all the time to return to a conversation I recently participated in.

@Samuel_Klein

Have two different palettes for the colorful reminders there are unviewed notifs

We already have a special color for unread notifications. You want even more color here, somehow? Wouldn’t that be quite noisy?

@Samuel_Klein

The full chronological list of notifs has its own page – make the link to that full page larger / more visible in the summary.

It seems quite visible to me, along with dimiss all?

If you have UX suggestions, I strongly advise whipping up some quick mockups, as those are easier to parse and respond to than a lot of text.