When you have a new topic draft in progress, it opens automatically when you go to the main topic list page. I’ve been annoyed about this in the past, but recently, it’s been getting in my way more and more. I realize the current design is intended to allow me to browse within a single tab while writing a topic, but I still often find it helpful to have multiple tabs open, personally.
For example, I always run into this issue is when I am writing up a weekly newsletter because it’s helpful to have multiple tabs open for the different topics I quote or reference while I’m writing the topic.
Here’s a few illustrations of the issues I face:
Figure 1
- Minimize new topic composer
- Go to another topic
- Go back to the topic list page
- New topic un-minimizes… and for some reason asks me whether I want to abandon my post
Why would you think I want to do that?
Figure 2
- Open new topic in another tab (no minimized composer is shown, great!)
- Go back to topic list
- New topic composer opens in yo’ face
Hey! I’m just trying to browse around the topics here, don’t need to see this composer right no, thank you very much.
Figure 3
Continuing from figure 2… OK, no big deal that the composer opens in my face, I guess, cuz I can just minimize it right? Then I can just continue browsing the site like I want to.
Well, now I’m back in the same situation as figure 1:
Figure 4
Alright, I’m kinda tired of minimizing this thing since it just keeps re-opening anyway…
- Continue writing a bunch of paragraphs for my topic in tab 1
- Go back to tab two to keep browsing
- Accidentally type a character in the composer of tab 2
- Wait… where are my paragraphs? Uh oh…
- Open a new tab and see that the composer has saved from tab 2 instead of tab 1
- Go back to tab 1 and see my paragraphs… phew… let’s not close this tab!
Recommendations
- When you browse to the topic list, only open the composer in the minimized state.
- When the composer is un-minimized, load the draft from the server.
- This will make it less annoying if I’m just trying to browse.
- I will be less likely to accidentally type into the wrong copy of the composer.
- Changes made in one tab will update in the other when I un-minimize it.
There will still be a risk that I un-minimize the composer in two tabs and they get out of sync, but the risk will be much smaller.
But recommendation #1 alone would solve much of my problem if that’s an easier place to start making changes…