Previews on the homepage
Aaron has been working on a proposal preview popover for the home page, thats going to look something like this. The idea is you click on the mini-pie and the popover comes out telling you the title of the proposal, the time to close (colour-coded to indicate urgency), and any new activity. The main point of the feature is that you can quickly catch up on new activity and clear your notification in one click.
I think it is a really sweet feature and it got me thinking about what it might develop into in the future.
I'm currently not totally thrilled with the Home page: the big list of groups on the right is duplicated in the groups dropdown, and the time-to-close takes up heaps of screen space for not much information.
So I did an experiment where I removed the groups list and the time-to-close (replaced with a red flag for proposals closing in the next 24hrs). That freed up half the page for me to play with so I figured we could use that space for a more comprehensive preview. This shows the discussion title, the discussion context (truncated), the proposal title & status, and any new activity for the discussion (comments + new positions; truncated too).
The idea is you'd have to go to actual the discussion page to participate, but this comprehensive preview would allow you to get up top speed with new activity.
Then coz I was having fun in photoshop I made another version where the preview expands vertically instead of horizontally.
Just thought I'd throw these up for some discussion - what do you think?
Richard D. Bartlett Tue 9 Oct 2012 9:58AM
Are you thinking of two popovers Aaron?
James McCann Tue 9 Oct 2012 10:45AM
Nice mockups Rich. Great discussion points here for the wider Loomio UX.
One potential advantage of the expanded preview (personally I like it) would be space for a comment box so you could make quick replies. May or may not be a good idea (and same with "quick votes") as it might encourage hasty discussion or decisions. Facebook manages this pretty effectively in the sidebar.
Also agree with Aaron (from what I think he is saying) that showing discussion and proposal activity condensed in one is a bit confusing. It might be better to have a scrolling pane here that could show full discussion comments for all of your unread comments as showing partial comments doesn't seem to help much as for the lengthy consensus-driving comments on Loomio.
Richard D. Bartlett Tue 9 Oct 2012 6:41PM
I have a hunch that part of the success of the app so far is that you can only participate in discussions when you are fully immersed in the discussion page. I think of it like a meeting room, you don't want people throwing comments in from the doorway. It feels like a good barrier to participation in the sense that you can only contribute once you're fully situated.
The intent of the preview is to give the user more information about what their notifications are referring to, which will inform whether or not they'd like to go all into the meeting room, sit down and participate, or if they'd rather move on to peek in the next door.
If combined proposal + comment activity is confusing, how do you feel about the main activity feed on each discussion? It's already combined!
I've often thought about splitting them, but it's hard to picture how to achieve that because proposal activity is often integral to a conversation.
Aaron Thornton Tue 9 Oct 2012 8:11PM
Hey Rich I was not necessarily referring to two popups, as I like the 'twitter-bootstrap collapse' action and could see it working well. I was meaning following the already established split of proposal info on right and discussion on the left.
Vivian raised a good point, that we are trying to encourage participation and shouldn't draw people away from clicking into where they can participate.
In that respect I would suggest if we did do it we would only show new comments and then only teasers of them.
The statements are all good to show as they are a kind of 'final statement' and don't require replies. I think they are easier and quicker to absorb when not shown amongst the comments.
Funny James should mention quick vote and quick comment options as we have already been down this path and implemented these exact features in a previous incarnation. It seems to be the next logical step. But you are definitely correct James in saying that this would detract from participating with the whole discussion in context.
I would like all the information on how the proposal is going, so I can schedule my response appropriately.
Aaron Thornton · Tue 9 Oct 2012 9:21AM
I personally think keeping the discussion/proposal split is quicker to absorb