Talk:Flow/Design/Iteration 1

Maryana's comments

Just some initial impressions:

• Yay, progressive disclosure of actions! This has been a source of strife for me on the prototype, since there are so many moderation actions available at the topic and post level that it's easy to get confused between menus. I think not displaying any actionable options on a topic/post until some kind of explicit "I'm interested and focusing" state is a good idea. Note that the "disclose actions on hover" model won't work for tablets or mobile – I think that's okay for now, since we're more or less in agreement that the first release will be read-only on mobile, but it's still something to think about.
• I totally missed the fact that the first and second mocks were topic-level and the third showed a full discussion thread. The topic titles + top-level posts should be more visually distinct from replies, and should more obviously invite a user to poke at and open them :)
• It's interesting to look at the pros and cons of non-threading here. I see the flat layout mostly on news and social media sites, where the goal is primarily to make sure that participants get their comment in and feel heard, not that they interact with each other in an in-depth way. No threading forces me to read the comments in sequence, which means I'm more likely to read whichever replies are at the top and less likely to read later ones on long discussions (I'll just get tired of scrolling), even if later replies are more interesting/thoughtful/relevant. It also means I'm less likely to engage in a long back-and-forth with one user, since I'd have to keep typing the @ sign + username and interrupting the comment stream. This has distinct advantages on a group discussion (less risk of spiraling into a flamewar), but what about a user-to-user discussion, like peer-to-peer collaboration or just plain socializing? Discussions on Wikipedia encompass all of these dimensions.
• We've been thinking of the archive and the history as two separate things, but seeing the archive link at the top of the board makes me wonder if they couldn't be the same thing. What if the history of the board was the archive, in the sense that it could show you how all the discussions developed over time? Some kind of easily navigable chronological view of when new topics/posts were added and by whom might alleviate the immediate need for search within board... Maryana (WMF) (talk) 20:38, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

I think that might be a crazygood idea, if i understood you right… "archive" is history, displayed as rollups and summaries rather than diffs? see "log" view of quora for simalarish example https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-definition-of-UX/log Jared Zimmerman (talk) 21:32, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

@JZimmerman yesssss... but we can make it prettier than that :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 22:16, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

@Maryana (WMF) I like the Quora one, especially the Diff Views Jared Zimmerman (WMF) (talk) 23:24, 6 September 2013 (UTC)