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Stare-Out posted:drat, well now there’s one less to worry about. They'd be nice to have for sure. I'll +1 it on the list. spanky the dolphin posted:Yeah fair enough. I thought it'd be cleaner but it's impossible to know if you need them for navigation or not without a mockup. If it were up to me I'd remove the Joined date and Post time too but I know that's too much. I'm always wary of removing elements that are on the Forums website. My goal is to present everything that's on the website but do it better than simply viewing the website in Safari. For us to leave something out (e.g. custom titles next to each post), it needs to meet a very high bar (e.g. would make posts unreadable on a phone-sized screen), and even then we should always try to reincorporate it (e.g. tap on avatar shows popover revealing custom text?). Otherwise, and I know this might sound stupid but I honestly believe it, we risk wrecking something that makes the Forums what they are. The lighter version of that risk is having divergent experiences between app/device/website that confuses people (e.g. "but I don't see that custom icon next to their username?") or causing people to miss out on relevant context (e.g. someone with a familiar posting style but a recent regdate triggering "whose rereg is this?" thoughts). I hope that leaves plenty of room for aesthetic and user experience decisions! But I think the outright removal of common elements is a big decision that needs a massive upside. edit: I'm taking about changes like removing the regdate from each post, which spanky already said was off the table. The lines are not an essential element  And the discussion is always welcome, I don't mean to quash that part, just that my actually executing on that discussion has a high bar.
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May 31, 2021 20:34
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pokeyman posted:Otherwise, and I know this might sound stupid but I honestly believe it, we risk wrecking something that makes the Forums what they are. The lighter version of that risk is having divergent experiences between app/device/website that confuses people (e.g. "but I don't see that custom icon next to their username?") or causing people to miss out on relevant context (e.g. someone with a familiar posting style but a recent regdate triggering "whose rereg is this?" thoughts).
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May 31, 2021 21:30
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The Dave posted:It’s ok to do more than 100% functional work, I promise. Design changes can have actual material benefits beyond chasing some abstract ideal, I promise. No one has articulated a benefit here, is what I'm challenging. Here's my case for keeping them: they're an unobtrusive, unmistakable indication of the end of one post and the start of the next. They help make the posts page comprehensible without any cognitive overhead of other elements looking similar, or having to guess whether the blank space is part of the post or between posts. They scale completely between an iPhone SE in portrait mode and an iPad Pro in landscape. And right now, they are tied into how we indicate read posts, which would probably look awkward if they weren't there. I'm seriously not trying to stonewall the idea, I'm just trying to tease out why we should do it over and above why we should keep the lines as they are. carry on then fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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May 31, 2021 23:56
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Okay, let me present an alternative layout that makes better use of the vertical space taken up by the horizontal dividers. This allows for full size avatars (upping from 125x125px to 180x180px on my XS, not sure if these are larger on other iProducts.) By shifting the post date to the right it cleans up the entry into the next avatar and post. I lowercased the AM / PM. This would be a better reading experience, surely. Also added some padding next to the av. spanky the dolphin fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 00:08
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spanky the dolphin posted:Okay, let me present an alternative layout that makes better use of the vertical space taken up by the horizontal dividers. fwiw I like this a lot and like the 'clean' look of getting rid of them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Jun 1, 2021 00:42
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humble end-user here: if you decide to get rid of the post dividing lines please make it optional. I do not like the proposed change.
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Jun 1, 2021 02:10
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spanky the dolphin posted:Okay, let me present an alternative layout that makes better use of the vertical space taken up by the horizontal dividers.
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Jun 1, 2021 02:36
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Mr. Fix It posted:humble end-user here: if you decide to get rid of the post dividing lines please make it optional. I do not like the proposed change. I think whatever is decided should just be implemented rather than adding more options. I’m not pushing super hard for the removal of those horizontal lines but I do think that if there is no noticeable navigation loss from removing them they should stay gone. Visually, less is more and the content of the posts will be easier to parse with fewer unnecessarily elements.
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Jun 1, 2021 03:35
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spanky the dolphin posted:I think whatever is decided should just be implemented rather than adding more options. Everything bleeds together without them. Having the post date/time on the right, which sucks for reading in a left-to-right language to begin with, does not do enough to distinguish mid-thread whether it belongs with the post above or below it. e: Again, no horse in the race, but if I were a user of an app that suddenly changed like that with no option, I would be unhappy.
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Jun 1, 2021 03:38
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Hold the line
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Jun 1, 2021 03:44
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astral posted:Everything bleeds together without them. Having the post date/time on the right, which sucks for reading in a left-to-right language to begin with, does not do enough to distinguish mid-thread whether it belongs with the post above or below it.  I appreciate that the app is so stable that CSS changes are discussed rather than bugs that actually break stuff
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Jun 1, 2021 04:58
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I don't like the removed lines.
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Jun 1, 2021 05:26
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Mr. Fix It posted:humble end-user here: if you decide to get rid of the post dividing lines please make it optional. I do not like the proposed change.
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Jun 1, 2021 06:12
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Ok, I get it. People don't like the removed lines. I do think it's premature to reject it outright without a functional mockup but I'll drop it so we can move on. How about this for an another idea. We reformat the 'Joined' and post date numbers to read as they do in the desktop forums. This method is tidier (no 'joined' text for every post) and easier to read than purely numerical. (What is the 9th month again...?) You could also put the 'edited' information in the same format alongside it. 
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Jun 1, 2021 06:12
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Post and edit dates on the same line look good, but again, left-to-right language. Post times should be (stay?) on the left. Displaying times themselves as 12h (AM/PM) or 24h is an option on the forums, and IMO if you're gonna change something about that, the app should either reflect the forums option directly or be able to optionally convert from whichever the user has currently selected. No preference on the date display format, myself, but that also strikes as a good candidate for an option. The forums time handling will be eventually improved to have more options (I don't believe we even have date format selection yet), real timezones instead of hacky offsets and DST handling, etc.
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Jun 1, 2021 06:21
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i mean honestly, joined could be dropped from the default display and just left in the profile display. i'd rather have something else there.
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Jun 1, 2021 06:23
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I already get the joined dates as “Joined 1 April 2010” or w/e?
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Jun 1, 2021 07:56
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Is keeping "joined" effecting the existing or proposed layout in any negative way
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Jun 1, 2021 11:33
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carry on then posted:Design changes can have actual material benefits beyond chasing some abstract ideal, I promise. I'll preface this by saying I actually don't know where I stand on the line and I genuinely believe it's way too hard to know without actual testing. It's not a bad thing to experiment with Awful UI and even something as trivial as the line might help spanky break his mental model of what the UI *needs* to be and what possibilities are on the table. The current layout we use is something that seems to be pretty successful and something I had a hand in creating and honestly my brain space the entire time was 'can Awful be more like slack?' Now 100% if a contributor doesn't want to make a change they don't agree with sure, it's a free project and you/their time. I also agree with everyone saying there are critical pieces of information that should always be in the thread view, but I think there's a little bit of a translation there and knowing what is right or wrong is best through some sort of testing channel and not having to blast it to everyone or hiding confidence between a settings toggle. There are 2 undeniable truths: 1) SA posters have vastly different needs and if a UX consultant was hired to draw up personas they would have a chart of 52 different depraved souls. 2) Ugh the context menus. On one hand an experimental theme to opt into is an interesting idea but if it's never realistically going to influence the main themes it becomes noise/another thing to manage.
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Jun 1, 2021 11:46
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If there’s one thing a user base absolutely loves it’s when UI/UX gets changed on a whim.
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Jun 1, 2021 11:56
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So I changed the ui on a whim, everybody. Enjoy! Just kidding. I created a new theme. There are a bunch of themes, dummies. We can leave the main OLED one alone. So this doesn’t match spanky’s screenshots exactly just yet. Need to tweak padding some more and realign the date, I guess. (The date format isn’t part of the theme, I’ll admit. We can have robust discussions over whether that should be a new setting or standard, if ya like) Anyway, spanky deserves his own theme for giving us the alternative icons and throbbers Also, playing with themes revealed an issue where the top and bottom bars had a grey line, even when no line was set. Happy to have sorted that at least
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Jun 1, 2021 12:40
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I think the visual changes are good but also completely independent of the horizontal lines - I would be in favor of 180x180 avatars even with the horizontal lines. Agreed. No matter what, for something like that please do make it optional (via theme or toggle or whatever). I'm not pushing again for the Android "everything is customizable" model since I get that's not what most iOS users want, but at the same time intelligent defaults can really be wrong for a lot of people - getting rid of the unobtrusive visual separator between posts would definitely be wrong for me, and aside from being "cleaner" it's not an obvious UI appearance or usability benefit.
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Jun 1, 2021 13:39
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Recently made the switch to iOS and I’m enjoying this app so far - thanks to the goons putting their time and effort into this. I do, however, have a question: why can’t in set the default view of the app to be my bookmarks? I spend most of my time on these, our dying comedy forums bouncing between threads I’m already subscribed to. I know this is am extremely minor gripe (which speaks to how good the app is), but I’m hoping that translates to it being a minor/easy feature to implement as a toggle in the options menu.
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Jun 1, 2021 14:16
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Badly Jester posted:Recently made the switch to iOS and I’m enjoying this app so far - thanks to the goons putting their time and effort into this. I do, however, have a question: why can’t in set the default view of the app to be my bookmarks? I spend most of my time on these, our dying comedy forums bouncing between threads I’m already subscribed to. I know this is am extremely minor gripe (which speaks to how good the app is), but I’m hoping that translates to it being a minor/easy feature to implement as a toggle in the options menu. Huh. Mine always goes back to bookmarks. Even if I force close it or it falls out of memory which is pretty rare
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Jun 1, 2021 14:38
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101 posted:Huh. Mine always goes back to bookmarks. Even if I force close it or it falls out of memory which is pretty rare Interesting - force-closing it definitely puts me back at the forums list without fail. However, I'm now starting to question why I felt compelled to post this in the first place - since I don't actually force close the app ever, and it generally does seem to remember where I left off. I'll have to pay more attention to it.
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Jun 1, 2021 14:59
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imo removing the hairline separators on the toolbars makes it look broken, there's zero separation between content and chrome. As for the dates, it would be a good idea to switch to just grabbing and displaying what the forums have, especially if new display options are going to be added that will affect the underlying HTML. I would have concerns about putting the edited and post dates on the same line. Again: we really need to see these things at both extremes (iPhone SE 1 and iPad Pro) to find issues with their display.
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Jun 1, 2021 15:05
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eschew change just for changes sake
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Jun 1, 2021 15:40
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Yeah, I wasn’t going to touch dates at all, but they’re already being parsed into date objects and all I had to do was change the dateStyle from .short to .medium in order to see how it looked Edited dates would require new parsing of post bodies and updates to the stencil, which is a bigger change. The navbar hairline removal is the only part I actually really like haha. I’m happy to make changes to a separate experimental theme tho. Maybe it becomes another rarely used theme in the list or maybe it never reaches beta. That’s alright. In any case, it won’t impact anyone. Even posting about ideas for potential change is quite offensive, I know… commie kong fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 16:04
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commie kong posted:Even posting about ideas for potential change is quite offensive, I know… No one is saying don't propose changes.
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Jun 1, 2021 16:08
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commie kong posted:Yeah, I wasn’t going to touch dates at all, but they’re already being parsed into date objects and all I had to do was change the dateStyle from .short to .medium in order to see how it looked I wonder how durable the date parser would be--maybe it can at least handle the new date formats so we don't break completely until we can figure out what we want to do to bring them through to the template.
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Jun 1, 2021 16:10
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Make all times render as swatch internet time, tia
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Jun 1, 2021 18:25
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Warbird posted:Make all times render as swatch internet time, tia Not an empty quote
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Jun 1, 2021 18:30
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carry on then posted:As for the dates, it would be a good idea to switch to just grabbing and displaying what the forums have, especially if new display options are going to be added that will affect the underlying HTML.
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Jun 1, 2021 22:27
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:This is certainly my preference - in this bold new era you should expect the forums to change. The app should be as thin a wrapper as possible that provides a mobile-friendly ui around the interface that exists, rather than trying to make its own policy. A simple example (from android, don't have iOS to test) is the edit post button - right now my understanding is the app has logic that says "is this my post? If so, let me edit it". Instead it should look for the edit post button in the html and display it if the forums do. This lets us play with the "edit post" policy (mods? wiki posts? the sky is the limit) and the app transparently gets the updates. Dates should be the same way - just show what the forums show. Telling that there's an "edit post" button at all in a way that's robust against such future changes is itself challenging. Would it be reasonable to put "user-editable" in the class list for a post if the user should be shown an editing affordance? That would let us more clearly act on the intent of the forums rather than hoping we've picked the part of the markup that's really invariant across whatever changes. ninja: similarly, a class="edit-date" span around the part of the editing message that contains the date would let us make things a fair bit more robust
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Jun 1, 2021 23:22
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:This is certainly my preference - in this bold new era you should expect the forums to change. The app should be as thin a wrapper as possible that provides a mobile-friendly ui around the interface that exists, rather than trying to make its own policy. A simple example (from android, don't have iOS to test) is the edit post button - right now my understanding is the app has logic that says "is this my post? If so, let me edit it". Instead it should look for the edit post button in the html and display it if the forums do. This lets us play with the "edit post" policy (mods? wiki posts? the sky is the limit) and the app transparently gets the updates. Dates should be the same way - just show what the forums show. It sounds like the ideal for you would be if the app just rendered the entire forums HTML as-is with no parsing at all. That’s understandable, since you have multiple third party concerns in mind with every potential change you want to make, but using the forums with a native, purpose built mobile application is what makes it so nice to use in the first place. It’s not just the layout and theme. Using OS features/controls to interact with and present any websites data is a much better experience than even the most mobile friendly website. In lieu of an api, that does necessitate parsing. Even with an api, we’d still be reimplementing views and controls. I hope the apps aren’t becoming too much of a concern. Maybe we could test them against the dev environment before any big changes?
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Jun 2, 2021 01:12
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commie kong posted:It sounds like the ideal for you would be if the app just rendered the entire forums HTML as-is with no parsing at all. I believe his message was meant to be more along the lines of "display an edit button if the page has one" rather than "display the page's edit button if it has one. I can't imagine he has any complaint about native controls, the appeal of using an app to begin with.
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Jun 2, 2021 01:35
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astral posted:I believe his message was meant to be more along the lines of "display an edit button if the page has one" rather than "display the page's edit button if it has one. I can't imagine he has any complaint about native controls, the appeal of using an app to begin with. Yeah, I read JoY as saying that he wants us to match the semantic intent of the forums, and to allow the forum-configured flexibility of future semantic options to manifest automatically where possible. Unfortunately, we have to work our way backwards from presentation content to semantic intent, but as long as things don’t get too weird we can probably tag-soup our way to smooth app victory. I unfortunately have a lot of experience with building an app whose job was to keep pace with a frequently-updated web site, so I tend to see the worst in these scenarios, because they all happened at some point. Often at the same point!
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Jun 2, 2021 01:41
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astral posted:I believe his message was meant to be more along the lines of "display an edit button if the page has one" rather than "display the page's edit button if it has one. I can't imagine he has any complaint about native controls, the appeal of using an app to begin with. Yeah I hope not  I interpreted “thin wrapper” as a plain web browser with the forums address locked into it.
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Jun 2, 2021 01:49
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I think that under the Jeffrey Doctrine we replace the meta-content (navigation, input, etc.) thoroughly, and leave the post content as high-fidelity as possible at least in terms of expressed semantics (editable, quoted, embedded, etc.)
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Jun 2, 2021 01:55
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Yeah I would hate to see the native parts of the app go, but sticking to the forums for post rendering as much as possible will help prevent those occasions where I've had to throw out a quick patch because one line of HTML changed and our parsing broke so completely the app was unusable.
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Jun 2, 2021 03:25
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