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

[solarbird]

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

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

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%)

Comments

Re: thoughts on a more substantial change

[solarbird]

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?

Re: thoughts on a more substantial change

[denise]

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...