Some articles have an abstract, but most don’t. Perhaps the UI could nudge authors towards writing one.
Now when you click “New Post”, there are text fields: title and body. It could be: title, abstract/summary, body. So that if you hate writing abstracts, you can still leave it empty and it works like previously, but it would always remind you that this option exists.
That’s a bad design imo. I’d bet it wouldn’t get used much.
Generally more options are bad. All UI options incur an attention cost on everyone who sees it even if the feature is niche. (There’s also dev upkeep cost.)
Fun fact: Manifold’s longform feature, called Posts, used to have required subtitles. The developer who made it has since left, but I think the subtitles were there to solve a similar thing—there was a page that showed all the posts and a little blurb about each one. One user wrote “why is this a requirement” as their subtitle. So I took out the subtitle from the creation flow, and instead used the first few lines of the body as the preview. I think not showing a preview at all, and just making it more compact, would also be good and I might do that instead.
An alternate UI suggestion: show from the edit screen what would show up “above the fold” in the hover over preview. No, I think that’s still too much, but its still better than an optional abstract field.
Some articles have an abstract, but most don’t. Perhaps the UI could nudge authors towards writing one.
Now when you click “New Post”, there are text fields: title and body. It could be: title, abstract/summary, body. So that if you hate writing abstracts, you can still leave it empty and it works like previously, but it would always remind you that this option exists.
That’s a bad design imo. I’d bet it wouldn’t get used much.
Generally more options are bad. All UI options incur an attention cost on everyone who sees it even if the feature is niche. (There’s also dev upkeep cost.)
Fun fact: Manifold’s longform feature, called Posts, used to have required subtitles. The developer who made it has since left, but I think the subtitles were there to solve a similar thing—there was a page that showed all the posts and a little blurb about each one.
One user wrote “why is this a requirement” as their subtitle. So I took out the subtitle from the creation flow, and instead used the first few lines of the body as the preview. I think not showing a preview at all, and just making it more compact, would also be good and I might do that instead.
An alternate UI suggestion: show from the edit screen what would show up “above the fold” in the hover over preview. No, I think that’s still too much, but its still better than an optional abstract field.