dw_suggestions | "Activity"-like view of 1st page of Inbox, in a dropdown, from Navigation Strip

Entry tags:

"Activity"-like view of 1st page of Inbox, in a dropdown, from Navigation Strip

Title:
"Activity"-like view of 1st page of Inbox, in a dropdown, from Navigation Strip

Area:
navigation strip, messaging

Summary:
It is currently very easy to configure your Inbox to serve as an activity notification hub. It would be very useful to have a shorted version of the first page of that Inbox be accessible via a dropdown on the Navigation Strip, and allow some manipulation of your Inbox via that dropdown.

Description:
Each line of the proposed dropdown would contain a one line description of the activity. (N replied to [your post|comment], N messaged you, subject "", N posted to group X, and so on). Each entry would contain an "x" dismissal button which would delete the notification from both the Inbox and the dropdown. Clicking on an individual entry outside of the dismissal button would take you to the item about which you are being notified - the message, the comment made, etc - and mark it as read. A "see all" entry at the bottom of the dropdown could take you to the current Inbox view. Currently, using the Inbox as a notification centre results in large numbers of page swaps and reloads, as you go from Inbox to post to Inbox to reply form to Inbox etc., etc., etc., with mark-as-read and delete-item as separate actions across separate pages. Further, it is difficult to maintain (de-clutter, etc) without engaging in that maintenance as a separate task. As a result, those of us who have this issue end up with over-full Inboxes that we tend to bulk-delete. This suggested feature would allow us both to use our Inbox more easily and maintain it more effectively, resulting in improved usability of the service and - hopefully - fewer notifications being stored on the servers.

Poll #18205 "Activity"-like view of 1st page of Inbox, in a dropdown, from Navigation Strip

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 37

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This suggestion:

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Should be implemented as-is.
9 (24.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
5 (13.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
6 (16.2%)

(I have no opinion)
17 (45.9%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

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I tried to just message you with this, buuuuuuut...

I've just thrown a bunch of desktop navbar mockups at my readers to see what they think. Here're the graphics for 11 different views.

These can't be done with custom CSS on the existing platform, they require actual code changes, but I'm keeping the load of those changes pretty much down to the UI side, insofar as I can tell.

One functionality change is getting rid of dropdown-plus-button to trigger a view reload on the reading view, and just having the dropdown selector do it directly.

I'm also adding a lot of prev message/next message arrows (when in single-post views) and prev page/next page arrows (when in journal or reading page views). And I bumped up the RSS functionality a little bit, that's a nice feature and I suspect an opportunity.

Another question I had was whether the style selector needs to be a set of top-level links or whether it could also be an action-on-selection dropdown. Right now I'm showing it the old way.

Anyway, I don't really consider these really final but they do accomplish the general task of dividing into three consistent groups (user/login, current location, exploration) and adding some basic functionality (like prev/next) that really is kind of implied by "navbar" and so on.

The background gradient is just the standard system gradient and could be replaceable with anything.

Ha, yeah, sorry, I have to keep PMs turned off or else I get a bunch of requests for technical support or site help that just wind up sitting there when I have a three-day "ugh I can't sit up long enough to grab my laptop and type" thing like the last three days have been... (You can email me, though -- denise@dreamwidth.org.)

These look amazing and I personally love them. Lemme throw them to our senior volunteers and see what they think. (I would like to keep the style selector as top-level links, though; links are easier than a dropdown selector, and since those options are there for accessibility, it's good to keep them as easy/quickly reachable as possible.)

At this point, I gots two requests for you:

1) Can you send me a signed contributor licensing agreement? (The CLA is a bidirectional ass-covering document: it protects us from ever getting sued because we're using something that someone else came up with, and it protects you from us ever coming to you and saying "this thing you did had a bug and we're suing you because it caused problems" or "you sent us this thing and now you're stuck giving us support for it/maintaining it for us for the rest of your life". It also makes it very clear that you're not signing over copyright/ownership to your creations, just a permanent and irrevocable license to use and redistribute your creations, so everything is very clear about who owns what.)

2). Then, join

dw_dev if you want -- that's our development community -- and

dw_design, which hasn't been used in ages but I'd like to resurrect, so we can get this discussion out of the comments of a single

dw_suggestions suggestion. :)

There are a couple of changes I need to make on desktop.

1) I need to swap "home" and "help." It's a standard to have "help" on the far right, and has been for years, and that just needs to happen.

2) See this post where I talk about 'trending tags' and 'latest posts sitewide', because I have some thoughts about when to swap those in, in addition to "popular RSS feeds." One of the complaints I hear most about Dreamwidth is the difficulty of finding similarly-interested people; let's expose some of that basic functionality.

I also need to make a couple of changes to the mobile taskbar, because there really need to be visual indicators that swiping is a thing, and I kind of knew that but didn't face up to it. The standard for this is chevrons at edges. It might be enough to have the chevrons appear and fade out after one second. That would be handy.

But after more testing on my end - the mobile login panel doesn't work on smaller phones. It's too small, the touch targets are too small. And some of the arrow targets are borderline on a small smartphone - for example the iPhone 5, which is kind of my baseline of a minimum smartphone still in use. Even if you take the touch zones and implement them the entire height of the screen, it's still going to feel weird.

So that needs a second version pretty badly. But the desktop version, we're just talking small tweaks.

Can we collect all this somewhere? Like dw_design or something?

Absolutely! That was going to be my next step, once I ran it past the senior volunteers. (Just because I love something doesn't mean that my opinion is necessarily the same as others', so I didn't want to post to dw-design before getting a few other thumbs-up first. But the people who've weighed in so far all like it.)

If you want to write up a brief explanation of the various views and what they do, and toss me a second version of the mobile mockups, I can post them to dw-design for you. (I don't want to ask you to post directly, because feedback can get really heated, so usual practice is for me to post it instead so you don't get the comment notifications and have to choose to go read the feedback. But if you'd prefer to post it yourself, you totally can -- posting is open to all members.) Then, I'll link to the dw-design post in our next news post to get more eyeballs + more feedback.

I definitely like the idea of linking to the Latest Things page. The "trending tags" is a little more hit-or-miss (as you've probably noticed); it's not a very smart calculation, and because of caching, sometimes it highlights a tag that doesn't actually have any entries in it...

Navbar 3.1 for mobile:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gs9oqkbz9r8yrli/AADQC2pXMJtblOGhZx9Jbd3ha?dl=0

I'll try to get 3.1 for desktop sorted out in a bit, but it's pretty similar to what's up there now, just with the whole Help/Home swap and all that.

Navbar 3.1 for Desktop:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qkunjvslzj2os9k/AACPfnFdNenyaCFldNnn0SH_a?dl=0

Both of these directories include first drafts of design/guideline docs.

Love. Love, omg, love. (Everybody who's weighed in on them so far has also loved, btw.) The design/guideline docs are fucking awesome, too, holy shiiiiiit can we keep you?

I'll write up a draft dw-design post laying out the reasons for the change/introducing the mockups and run it by you in email to give me thumbs up/thumbs down on -- probably won't be tonight (catching up on other shit) but if we get it posted by Monday, I'll be able to include it in the next news post. Can you drop me an email (denise@dreamwidth.org) now just so I know what's the best email to use for you? (Also because my email server will impose delivery delays as an antispam feature if it's the first time someone's emailed me from that domain, and looking at your confirmed DW address, you might run into that; better to get started on waiting out the greylisting now.)

Email sent from verified account; passed greylisting, logged as successfully handed to your server at 23:59:10 Pacific/Cascadian time.

(We also run greylisting, have for years, it's a necessity.)

Another thing that needs to happen is a proper clean, simple, and responsive basic journal style - something not unlike the year styles of Wordpress, perhaps. It should be one that people can customise, of course, and it should be the default style on new accounts, and the standard version of it should be selectable view-in-style option (see also: "Mobile style" shown in the mobile navbar dropdown.) All this is in part because Dreamwidth needs to work on mobile, and right now, it mostly kinda doesn't.

I don't know whether this is something which can be handled in the current style system. Can it?

And I have fished it out of my spam folder after thinking "huh, I should have gotten that by now"!

Journal styles are more complicated than site pages, but we can definitely talk about that too! (We do have Mobility, a style that's designed to work well on mobile, but there's still a ton of stuff we can do; we've just been limited by a lack of designers and by a large percentage of the site still being in the old custom templating language that Brad dreamed up even before LJ existed. We're converting it, but sloooowly.)

I need to make a testbed account so I can play with stuff without affecting my live journal.

eta: lololol I didn't even mean that XD

("my live [as in visible online] journal here at Dreamwidth")

Edited 2017-04-28 00:21 (UTC)

Ha! Yeah, go ahead and make one and then drop me the username, I'll give it some paid time. (Or you could get an account on our hosted-developer-environments service, but a full dev environment might be overkill for you...)

heh

check out

solarbird_testbed and by that i mean check it out on a phone.

(my goal is to take the default new user style, clean it up (there are a lot of problems tbh, not the least of which is that fonts behave really differently across different browsers) and make it automatically flip into optimised-for-phone mode if viewed in such an environment.)

Edited 2017-04-28 05:15 (UTC)

yeaaaaah

I may've gone ahead and written 470 lines of new CSS for the default new user style (Neutral Good) that fixes a fleet of bugs in the style and also adds pretty functional mobile support

I mean sure, it's an alpha, but - you want mobile Dreamwidth, Artie? You got it.

solarbird_testbed and some notes on the updated style. (like, it makes no attempt to make system-style pages do anything, it's pure CSS, and so on.)

Anybody sees this, it really is an alpha, report bugs over here please.

Edited 2017-04-28 08:35 (UTC)

And I hit up the account with paid time, so you'll be able to create plenty of styles and such!

We aren't wedded to Practicality/Neutral Good as a default style, btw -- we used to run polls every six-to-nine months for the userbase to decide on what the default style for new accounts should be, but we haven't done it for a while because it's kind of a pain and there's always eight billion other things further up the list. So we can always change it. I like the first look at it and will do a full accessibility review when I get a chance!

(A lot of stuff may also be doable at the system layer without needing all that CSS, too, but I am soooo not the person to look into that;

momijizukamori does a lot of our CSS-to-S2 conversions. I'll page her in.)

Basically, it is my strident opinion that whatever the new user default style is, it must work well on both desktop and mobile.

Version 0.8 alpha released. Same place. Lots of bugs fixed, a good bit more cleanup, vastly improved comment trees on mobile. I'm using a > symbol where I'd rather be using a right-pointing black triangle but Dreamwidth's parser breaks if I use that, so I'm doing with the > for now.

D pointed me here - as she says, I'm one of the three or so people who've done the most digging around in the S2 system, as well as some digging in other sitescheme pages. I will also make grabby-hands, because I'm pretty comfortable writing code but like, design is hard and stuff, and having someone interested in that is a huge boon. I also don't use DW on mobile much so I'm a little out of touch with the problems there and what the right fixes are.

Hi!

I may've had some cider but I'm not drunk-typing. Pretty sure. Might be but it's cool.

Basically the existing default style for new users doesn't work at all well on phones and has a lot of problems on desktop for that matter so I've taken a run at fixing both problems and maybe a couple of others because I'm 140% serious, new users need to be dumped into a functional environment without crushed text and a mobile view that pretty much doesn't and other brokenness, right?

You should look at

solarbird_testbed and the read page for it, because those are all changes made with CSS to declutter/repair the desktop and add what I'm pretty sure is a lot of usability to the mobile experience.

One of the biggest problems of course is the double-margins/double-boundaries and acres of floating lines, which isn't good on desktop but is particularly problematic on a mobile device (particularly a phone) because holy crow you don't have room for that shit. Plus it's mostly just visual distraction anyway.

(Also the eye-flow on desktop is kind of "LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT NOW I'M STARING INTO A BLACK VOID WHAT IS GOING oh it's just the banner, there's the journal, below it" so that kinda needed to be addressed too.)

I'm not trying to make a new style from scratch with this project tho', I'm basically trying to go with, "okay, what can we do quickly to fix the current default style so that new users get a generally functional experience straight out the gate," because what they do after that with customisation is their own lookout. XD

anyway, hiya!

For sure - though we probably can't make any changes to the desktop view and keep it the same layout, because current users will notice a 2px change in where something is, and they will revolt :P (I did the conversion of site-styled entry/comment pages from the old awful system to S2, and I'm not even exaggerating about 2px changes). On a related note, this was a thing brought to my attention by a friend last week - does it seem like a useful general stop-gap measure? It wouldn't be hard to implement across the style system more generally.

Well my proposal fundamentally is to make a new default style, which is basically the current default Version 2, and hand that to new accounts.

My primary concern at the moment is new users. People who are here already would be able to switch to it, of course, but new users could be being handed a more functional experience in very short order - at least, if the CSS layer I've been writing can be rolled out. (It would require more testing, of course, I've only been testing it on Safari and Firefox on OS X/MacOS, but still: it could be done quickly.)

Ah, okay! I misunderstood something farther up in the comment chain, carry on :) I can also maybe point more people at it for a greater range of test data if you'd like? I don't want to accidentally overwhelm you, though!

Do it. Here's the current update post - I just dropped Coexistence Alpha 0.82 which makes the mobile-only comment depth markers work all the way down. And there have been a bunch of other fixes since 0.81 as well.

Sure thing - is it also live on your test account?

It is live on

solarbird_testbed, but that is where I do my work? So that's not so much "bleeding edge" as just "bleeding," and it breaks constantly when I'm working on the code. XD

solarbird always has the current reasonably stable at the moment, and the version linked on the status post.

Edited 2017-05-01 17:46 (UTC)

also, I just had that moment where I collapsed my browser down to mobile view on my desktop to reply to this, because nested comments this deep work better in mobile view than normal desktop view.

aw. yeah. XD

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"Activity"-like view of 1st page of Inbox, in a dropdown, from Navigation Strip

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