Why remove “x min read”? Even if it’s not gonna be super accurate between different people’s reading speeds, I still found it very helpful to decide at a glance how long a post is (e.g. whether to read it on the spot or bookmark it for later).
Mostly because there is a prior against any UI element adding complexity.
In this case, with the new ToC progress bar which is now always visible, you can quickly glance the length of the post by checking the length of the progress bar relative to the viewport indicator. It’s an indirect inference, but I’ve gotten used to it pretty quickly. You can also still see the word count on hover-over.
I find a visual indicator much less useful and harder to reason about than a number, I feel pretty sad at lacking this. How hard would it be to have as an optional addition?
Maintaining many different design variants pretty inevitably leads to visual bugs and things being broken, so I am very hesitant to allow people to customize things at this level (almost every time we’ve done that in the past the custom UI broke in some way within a year or two, people wouldn’t complain to us, and in some cases, we would hear stories 1-2 years later that someone stopped using LW because “it started looking broken all the time”).
We are likely shipping an update to make the reading time easier to parse in the post-hover preview to compensate some for the lack of it not being available on the post page directly. I am kind of curious in which circumstances you would end up clicking on the post page without having gotten the hover-preview first (mobile is the obvious one, though we are just adding back the reading time on mobile, that was an oversight on my part).
Typically, opening a bunch of posts that look interesting and processing them later, or being linked to a post (which is pretty common in safety research, since often a post will be linked, shared on slack, cited in a paper, etc) and wanting to get a vibe for whether I can be bothered to read it. I think this is pretty common for me.
I would be satisfied if hovering over eg the date gave me info like the reading time.
Another thing I just noticed: on one of my posts, it’s now higher friction to edit it, since there’s not the obvious 3 dots button (I eventually found it in the top right, but it’s pretty easy to miss and out of the way)
I would be satisfied if hovering over eg the date gave me info like the reading time.
Oh, yeah, sure, I do think this kind of thing makes sense. I’ll look into what the most natural place for showing it on hover is (the date seems like a reasonable first guess).
on one of my posts, it’s now higher friction to edit it, since there’s not the obvious 3 dots button (I eventually found it in the top right, but it’s pretty easy to miss and out of the way)
I think this is really just a “any change takes some getting used to” type deal. My guess is it’s slightly easier to find for the first time than the previous design, but I am not sure. I’ll pay attention to whether new-ish users have trouble finding the triple-dot, and if so will make it more noticeable.
I don’t get a progress bar on mobile (unless I’m missing it somehow), and the word count on hover feature seemingly broke on mobile as well a while ago (I remember it working before).
Ah, I think showing something on mobile is actually a good idea. I forgot that the way we rearranged things that also went away. I will experiment with some ways of adding that information back in tomorrow.
Why remove “x min read”? Even if it’s not gonna be super accurate between different people’s reading speeds, I still found it very helpful to decide at a glance how long a post is (e.g. whether to read it on the spot or bookmark it for later).
Showing the word count would also suffice.
Mostly because there is a prior against any UI element adding complexity.
In this case, with the new ToC progress bar which is now always visible, you can quickly glance the length of the post by checking the length of the progress bar relative to the viewport indicator. It’s an indirect inference, but I’ve gotten used to it pretty quickly. You can also still see the word count on hover-over.
I find a visual indicator much less useful and harder to reason about than a number, I feel pretty sad at lacking this. How hard would it be to have as an optional addition?
Maintaining many different design variants pretty inevitably leads to visual bugs and things being broken, so I am very hesitant to allow people to customize things at this level (almost every time we’ve done that in the past the custom UI broke in some way within a year or two, people wouldn’t complain to us, and in some cases, we would hear stories 1-2 years later that someone stopped using LW because “it started looking broken all the time”).
We are likely shipping an update to make the reading time easier to parse in the post-hover preview to compensate some for the lack of it not being available on the post page directly. I am kind of curious in which circumstances you would end up clicking on the post page without having gotten the hover-preview first (mobile is the obvious one, though we are just adding back the reading time on mobile, that was an oversight on my part).
Typically, opening a bunch of posts that look interesting and processing them later, or being linked to a post (which is pretty common in safety research, since often a post will be linked, shared on slack, cited in a paper, etc) and wanting to get a vibe for whether I can be bothered to read it. I think this is pretty common for me.
I would be satisfied if hovering over eg the date gave me info like the reading time.
Another thing I just noticed: on one of my posts, it’s now higher friction to edit it, since there’s not the obvious 3 dots button (I eventually found it in the top right, but it’s pretty easy to miss and out of the way)
Oh, yeah, sure, I do think this kind of thing makes sense. I’ll look into what the most natural place for showing it on hover is (the date seems like a reasonable first guess).
I think this is really just a “any change takes some getting used to” type deal. My guess is it’s slightly easier to find for the first time than the previous design, but I am not sure. I’ll pay attention to whether new-ish users have trouble finding the triple-dot, and if so will make it more noticeable.
I don’t get a progress bar on mobile (unless I’m missing it somehow), and the word count on hover feature seemingly broke on mobile as well a while ago (I remember it working before).
Ah, I think showing something on mobile is actually a good idea. I forgot that the way we rearranged things that also went away. I will experiment with some ways of adding that information back in tomorrow.