I had a discussion recently where I gave feedback to Ben P. about the dialogue UI. This got my brain turning, and a few other recommendations for UI changes bubbled up to top of mind.
Vote display (for karma and agree/disagree)
Histogram of distribution of votes (tiny, like sparklines, next to the vote buttons). There should be four bars: strong negative vote count, negative vote count, positive vote count, strong positive vote count. The sum of all votes is less informative and interesting to me than the distribution. I want to know the difference between something being controversial versus meh. Or, for example, if something is strongly liked by a few, but mildly disliked by many.
Comment Optimization (I’m not saying these things need to be mandatory, just having them as options would be sufficient. I do think they should be on-by-default though.) Hide number of up/down votes, poster name, agree/disagree until you’ve voted on karma or agree/disagree respectively. Hide emojis & underlines until you’ve voted karma and agree/disagree.
Vote buttons at bottom of comments, rather than top. (Optimizing for reading long comments where the top of the comment will be out of sight. Also, don’t want someone to vote on the comment before they’ve read the whole thing!)
Agree/disagree voting on posts, not just comments. Maybe even on paragraphs? But others’ votes not visible unless you place your own.
Less collapsing of comments. Long comments are a good thing! I rarely think long comments are empty rants. They almost always have logical structure and points that need the whole thing to understand. Collapsing/shortening should happen only on request. The thing that should be collapsed is comment threads. Maybe don’t show anything but the first message in a thread and the thread comment count until a vote has been registered for a comment. Discourage skimming, encourage careful reading.
The comment map is helpful. Even more helpful would be if it had indicators for where you’d interacted with those comments. So that you can either deliberately go back to a comment you agreed/disagreed with to find a useful quote, or avoid the comments you’ve interacted with in order to find novel comments to read.
Profile Optimization The number of posts or comments displayed on main page or a person’s profile is way too short. I want to be able to set a preference for showing like… 50 or 100 or 300 before needing to click ‘see more’.
And I’m usually looking for either a comment OR a post, and know ahead of time which type. So the sections should start collapsed entirely by default, or simply be links. A link to “posts”, “comments”, “short forms”, “all writing combined”. Being able to then sort the viewed category either by recency or karma or reactivity (total number of agree and disagree votes) or controversy (highest number of pairs of agree/disagree votes, ie min(agree, disagree)/2 )
If I have the full text of the users’ most recent comments and posts in a list of 300 items long, it’s easy for me to text search for keywords. This is a much better option than trying to use a search system built/maintained by the site.
Loading so many items at once may take some time. You could load in batches, displaying them as they get loaded (and showing a spinning loading symbol at the top while this happens.) This is far preferable to having to click for each batch!
Similarly, I always want the front page to display the top 100 or 200 posts, not like… 15 or whatever.
Oh yeah, and the order of interacting with a post should be: read post, vote, comment. So why is the vote button at the top? We don’t want to encourage people to vote before reading!
So why have them read the post, scroll to the top, vote, scroll back to the bottom, comment....
Posts that have more than like 3 paragraphs of text also have vote buttons at the bottom. It’s just very short posts where it looks really weird to have two vote sections right next to each other where we omit one of them.
I had a discussion recently where I gave feedback to Ben P. about the dialogue UI. This got my brain turning, and a few other recommendations for UI changes bubbled up to top of mind.
Vote display (for karma and agree/disagree)
Histogram of distribution of votes (tiny, like sparklines, next to the vote buttons). There should be four bars: strong negative vote count, negative vote count, positive vote count, strong positive vote count. The sum of all votes is less informative and interesting to me than the distribution. I want to know the difference between something being controversial versus meh. Or, for example, if something is strongly liked by a few, but mildly disliked by many.
Comment Optimization
(I’m not saying these things need to be mandatory, just having them as options would be sufficient. I do think they should be on-by-default though.)
Hide number of up/down votes, poster name, agree/disagree until you’ve voted on karma or agree/disagree respectively.
Hide emojis & underlines until you’ve voted karma and agree/disagree.
Vote buttons at bottom of comments, rather than top. (Optimizing for reading long comments where the top of the comment will be out of sight. Also, don’t want someone to vote on the comment before they’ve read the whole thing!)
Agree/disagree voting on posts, not just comments. Maybe even on paragraphs? But others’ votes not visible unless you place your own.
Less collapsing of comments. Long comments are a good thing! I rarely think long comments are empty rants. They almost always have logical structure and points that need the whole thing to understand. Collapsing/shortening should happen only on request.
The thing that should be collapsed is comment threads. Maybe don’t show anything but the first message in a thread and the thread comment count until a vote has been registered for a comment. Discourage skimming, encourage careful reading.
The comment map is helpful. Even more helpful would be if it had indicators for where you’d interacted with those comments. So that you can either deliberately go back to a comment you agreed/disagreed with to find a useful quote, or avoid the comments you’ve interacted with in order to find novel comments to read.
Profile Optimization
The number of posts or comments displayed on main page or a person’s profile is way too short. I want to be able to set a preference for showing like… 50 or 100 or 300 before needing to click ‘see more’.
And I’m usually looking for either a comment OR a post, and know ahead of time which type. So the sections should start collapsed entirely by default, or simply be links. A link to “posts”, “comments”, “short forms”, “all writing combined”. Being able to then sort the viewed category either by recency or karma or reactivity (total number of agree and disagree votes) or controversy (highest number of pairs of agree/disagree votes, ie min(agree, disagree)/2 )
If I have the full text of the users’ most recent comments and posts in a list of 300 items long, it’s easy for me to text search for keywords. This is a much better option than trying to use a search system built/maintained by the site.
Loading so many items at once may take some time. You could load in batches, displaying them as they get loaded (and showing a spinning loading symbol at the top while this happens.) This is far preferable to having to click for each batch!
Similarly, I always want the front page to display the top 100 or 200 posts, not like… 15 or whatever.
Oh yeah, and the order of interacting with a post should be: read post, vote, comment. So why is the vote button at the top? We don’t want to encourage people to vote before reading! So why have them read the post, scroll to the top, vote, scroll back to the bottom, comment....
Posts that have more than like 3 paragraphs of text also have vote buttons at the bottom. It’s just very short posts where it looks really weird to have two vote sections right next to each other where we omit one of them.
Yes, I’m aware of that. I’m saying that they shouldn’t have them at the top. Why let someone vote on a post if they haven’t made it to the bottom?