Discussion activity chronology
Jesse Doud
Public
Seen by 222
We're rolling out natural discussion item chronology early next week (7.10.13).
We wanted to have a place where members can go and talk about the change. The user testing we've done has shown that the flipped discussion order will be quite intuitive for new users. On the other hand, our lovely members who have grown accustomed to "new to old" discussion chronology may have some growing pains.
In the end, we think that our users will love arriving at a new discussion and reading from top to bottom, and commenting in the flow of the dialouge.
Here's a blog about the changes.
Robert Guthrie Mon 7 Oct 2013 9:03AM
Thanks @annaguenther, the correct page on load will be fixed in about an hour.
Alanna Irving Mon 7 Oct 2013 9:05AM
The thing where it's supposed to automatically take you to the first new part of the discussion doesn't seem to be working for me - it's just loading all discussions from the start @matthewbartlett @jessedoud
Robert Guthrie Mon 7 Oct 2013 9:11AM
@alannakrause - it'll be sorted in 30 mins
Joshua Vial Mon 7 Oct 2013 9:17AM
I'm absolutely hating this experience - I'm guessing that's because of the broken thing Alanna mentioned.
I pretended that was working for a bit and imagined I'd just landed at the part of the comments that were unread and I still didn't like the feature. Mostly because I was disoriented and had to scroll to the top to figure out which discussion I was on again.
This may relate to my workflow of inbox management which is along the lines of ctrl click 5 subjects in new tabs - read through each one at a time, go back to inbox and refresh which is probably a non-standard way of using the site.
Either way I'd really appreciate a very prominent 'hey we've changed stuff' thing in the app whenever changes roll out. Trello does this very well
Currently loomio is currently behaving more like yammer and I feel like I'm being abused by microsoft.
It's awesome that you're focusing on the new user experience but please don't ignore your power users in the process.
Matthew Bartlett Mon 7 Oct 2013 9:18AM
@annaguenther right- or Ctrl-click the timestamp (e.g. '10 minutes ago) and click Copy Link Address (slightly different with different browsers)
Alanna Irving Mon 7 Oct 2013 10:10AM
@joshuavial my workflow is exactly the same - go to inbox, open all new content in tabs. So you're not that unusual :p
Personally I'm going to withhold any judgement until they get the "jumps right to the blue line" bit working. I agree about being disoriented about which discussion you're on, but I think I'd get used to it.
However I agree that we should urgently post of of those "blue box" messages that appears in the app to all users letting them know about this change. Just so people know what's going on.
Joshua Vial Mon 7 Oct 2013 10:24AM
@alannakrause To test that I just opened up 5 tabs, scrolled to the blue line and then ignored them for 5 mintues. When I came back there was no visual queue on each one as to which discussion it was so I'm pretty the auto scroll won't fix that.
Personally I would suggest rolling the whole feature back until the fix is up and it's gone through more testing. Then introduce it by giving everyone a heads up first.
Jesse Doud Mon 7 Oct 2013 10:59AM
@joshuavial @alannakrause sorry you all are having such a bad time! What we all experienced during the roll out is a migration bug that will be fixed shortly.
To be clear, the expected behavior that is not occurring is on multi-page discussions where the reader has already read past the first page. When new activity occurs, you'll be brought back to the last read activity point, no matter what page of the discussion that point may be. There isn't any auto-scrolling in this feature.
I agree that without this part of the feature, it's a poor user experience. We are absolutely committed to getting it right for new, experienced and power users. Thanks for the amazing feedback everyone, keep it coming!
Joshua Vial Mon 7 Oct 2013 11:05AM
@jessedoud in that case I would suggest an immediate rollback as without the auto scroll this is a big usability regression that will annoy the majority of the user base. At the very lease provide some configurable options so users can opt in to the old way of doing things.
Anna Guenther · Mon 7 Oct 2013 8:53AM
Loving the new layout! On some convos, it doesn't automatically take me to the most recent tab though (even if I've read the comments already), so I have to scroll through the pages at the bottom. It's happened twice on the same discussion now.
And, @matthewbartlett - how do you figure out the link for a specific comment?