Just to be clear, I don't want any of these ideas implemented in the
trunk during this pass. The long lists are fine for now.
I'm chiefly interested in clouds in the context of filters because a
cloud adds a compact visual overview of what a jug is trying to do
while providing some navigability to a set that doesn't have a very
intuitive natural ordering. You currently can't get any global idea
of what a jug is doing without scrolling through all the controls that
modify it; I think mapping weights -> sizes is a natural fit for
conveying this. I'm not convinced it's actually good enough to
replace the filter panel but I'm willing to listen to additional
details of how you actually interact with this.
I'm skeptical about the usefulness the feeds-as-a-cloud idea ; I still
doubt that individual feed weighting is important for more than a
small fraction of feeds in the majority of cases. I'm not sure what
else you'd be differentiating by. Doesn't seem to be buying anything
significant to me.
Taking the feed/filter panel off the page entirely doesn't seem
necessary to me if you're just worried about real estate. It also
disguises what the system is doing from people who are browsing it and
I'm willing to bet it makes tinkering with things an order of
magnitude less likely. If all of the important controls are hidden
(especially behind things that already mean something different in
another context) I think we're in trouble. Although I think making it
look more application-y will help, one of the main challenges so far
has been getting people to realize there is something to interact with
so I want to be cautious about making things fade too far into the
distance...
It also seems like we haven't even scratched the surface of
traditional approaches... Limit the amount that's displayed at once,
use scrolling/paging, sorting, categorization and simple searching to
move through it... ?
- Luke
On Aug 19, 2008, at 10:45 AM, Christopher Patterson wrote:
On Aug 19, 2008, at 9:29 AM, Rolando Penate wrote:
On Aug 14, 2008, at 4:04 PM, Randall Leeds wrote:
Rollie, I love the cloud format. Some thought needs to go into how
we can similarly ease the pain of having tons of feeds.
I was thinking we could give the feed list the same cloud
treatment. Perhaps try some other treatments as well. You have any
suggestions?
I'm still not totally sure that a cloud format is the best fit for
the filter list. The expectations I have when presented with a tag
cloud are that I can click any of the links to see a list of items
matching that tag - the parallel here would be that clicking any of
the filters in the cloud would update the feed to just show feed
items matching that filter. That feels a little awkward to me, but
maybe that's a use case we want to support. I'd defer to Luke on how
labor-intensive something like that would be to add.
I think that we may want to consider having the list of feeds not
shown on the reader pages by default. It would lose us the ability
to instantly turn feeds into filters, but would free up a ton of
real estate in that sidebar.
I know we've already committed to implementing some changes, and I
don't mean to press that anything I say here should happen right
now. Maybe once things stabilize. I'm just trying to raise
interesting issues before I forget them and I'll consolidate
whatever discussion comes out into real trac issues.
Understandable, I just like to reiterate that once in a while to
slow the inexorable push for scope creep. :)
To revisit my issues with Share button, how do we feel about
expanding the share button on mouse over? It keeps clutter AND
click count low.
Seems worth a shot. It's my understanding that Chris Patterson is
working on some alternatives.
I've just committed the current version (with mouseover behavior) -
check out r1353.
On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 3:34 PM, Rolando Penate <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
We have a first round of UI changes that Luke has committed to and
we're currently implementing. I think these changes are great and
am pleased to see them underway. That, however, doesn't mean they
are perfect and we've been throwing around some ideas for future
iterations.
One of the ones that Luke asked us to post to the development list
is one for a filter cloud. It was an idea that I threw out in
response to needing a very compact summary view of the filters and
feeds when presented with a long list. Basically, you'd just have
the filter names in a comma-separated list, color-coded like in
the article meta (blue for tags, yellow for authors, orange for
feeds, etc), maybe sized based on how they are weighted. It
basically assumes our audience is somewhat as comfortable with
stuff like that as delicious users are.
I gave it a very quick pass for filters:
http://img.skitch.com/20080814-nu3jqymq45dreb2rrtmxes5tbc.png
Compare it with: http://img.skitch.com/20080813-n799g3kmkpsrbdhcp9t27qg3au.png
Just imagine that inside of 'Hide/Show' button there is a 'List/
Cloud' button.
—R
On Aug 14, 2008, at 3:19 PM, Randall Leeds wrote:
Seems time is ripe (maybe over ripe) for ui discussion, so I'll
drop in two more.
Group feeds into folders.
For me the added value of melkjug boils down to the ability to
subscribe to more sources without more headache. We need a design
that allows 100+ feeds without getting messy.
Maybe the side bar should scroll separately from the article
list? Access to your filters from anywhere on the page sounds
like a good idea.
On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 2:51 PM, Randall Leeds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
I have a few UI notes I thought I'd drop in here:
1) I know I thought it was slick at first, but I'm reversing my
opinion. Is there a reason the green "share" button isn't
expanded by default? Do we really need it collapsed if we only
have a few options for how to share it? I suppose it makes
sharing via e-mail (better for us because we get to stick in a
melkjug.org link) more prominent, but it's a usability problem
possibly to always have to click twice.
2) Can we pop up the delicious share link on the page rather than
opening a new page? If there were some way to have it
automatically disappear after the user submits the form that
would be ultra hot. Not sure this is possible.
On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 1:42 PM, Luke Tucker
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
FYI,
The trunk of the melkjug package is undergoing heavy changes as
we rework the UI. Please expect some large fluctuations in the
look and functionality of things for the time being. I recommend
using an earlier release or tag for the time being if you need a
stable UI.
- Luke
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