Topic on Talk:Flow Portal/Archive2

My biggest concern with the interactive prototype (a concern I share with LQT) is that the individual posts/replies are way too tall. The current colon-based wiki discussion system is well suited to a high volume of short posts, which is what usually occurs on wiki talk pages. Flow looks as if it will be more oriented towards fewer but longer posts, more like an online forum.

Facebook handles this quite well, using a compact style for comments which allows many to be seen at once (although the font size is too small for our purposes).

I am worried there will be a large community backlash if discussions will take twice the screen real estate. It is already hard enough to skim posts on very-high-volume discussion pages like w:WP:ANI, and it would become quite frustrating with the proposed Flow layout.

I agree, having a more compact format is a must. In my opinion, the reason is that the font is too large. If thes were reduced to current ones, it would be much more compact. Also, I proposed deleting the second row for user details, so that saves a bit more space. Bye!

+1 for providing some compact format.

I agree as well. For me, ideally, Flow should look almost identically to current talk pages. I think their layout is the only good part about them.

Compare the original with a modified version. (The arrow, if clicked, would reveal a menu with "Mark abusive", "Delete" (for admins), "Move" (maybe), etc - similar to the [More] of LQT.)

Better, but I would compact it even further. Something akin to how discussions look like with a script I developed. The "reply" button would be put somewhere where signature links are in this screenshot.

I think the Prototypes, just like the earlier static-mockup-illustrations, are more for demonstrating the concepts and features and possibilities, rather than for the aesthetics. Software devs tend to make clear and simple models initially, and leave the aesthetic-fine-tuning until later...

Also, CSS means we could potentially have a newcomer-friendly version, with oodles of whitespace and big friendly buttons; versus a compact-power-user-version with dense-as-current-layout (or like reddit, etc) with additional links and features that would overwhelm newcomers (or non-geeks).

UI always has to tread the balance between too-simple and overwhelming-options. (E.g. Firefox's options menu, versus its [about:config]) But web UI has more flexibility...

There are other ways of solving the too-much-scrolling problem. For example, if comments you've previously read are partially collapsed (perhaps like Gmail's threaded messages), then the height of individual unread messages won't be as big of a deal. You won't need a design that crams 1,000 words onto a screen, because you'll only need to see the 50 words that you haven't read yet and enough of the others to see which ones you want to re-read.