Reposting from a good conversation with @erlend_sh over at humanetech.org: Some specific feedback on design with a calm-tech perspective, to help people preserve focus and avoid distraction.
1: On the topic overview, let readers focus on the topic titles.
- Make titles 90% of the view, rather than 40%.
- Compress icons together (overlap?), limit the variation in repeated information like ‘views’ and ‘activity’ (e.g.: clustering to the nearest day or order-of-magnitude)
- Offer slight variation in background color for the topic titles, to break up a long page.
- Use color where you expect eyes to go. Don’t have most of the color variation in the user-icons, unless the goal is mainly viewing and clicking on those icons.
2: For categories: by default don’t let a category take up more than one line in the drop-down menu. That led to us removing most category-description posts, since they make the dropdown less convenient to use.
3: For alerts:
The bright blue New! that pops up when a topic has new posts is pretty intrusive.
What would you recommend instead?
Make the notification visible when someone is looking for it, in a persistent place, but not otherwise. So it shouldn’t show up in the title column at all – it interferes with alignment and linespacing. You could put the blue “{n}” indicator for new posts next to the existing count of the # of replies. You might replace an actual number with one, two, or three tiny dots, for “1-2”, “3-5”, “many” – again on the principle that you don’t want to overwhelm w/ detail.
4: The notifications summary can also be less distracting. Right now it is an undifferentiated stream that is always disarmingly messy: things never disappear from it, they simply become unhighlighted.
Simple: Let people keep notifs clear. Cluster them so a single round of interactions doesn’t take up an entire screen. Have two different palettes for the colorful reminders there are unviewed notifs: one if there are new notifs since you last looked at the list, and a less glaring set if you’ve already reviewed them. The full chronological list of notifs has its own page – make the link to that full page larger / more visible in the summary.
More work: automatically unflag changes whose pages you have visited / read directly. Possibly have each cluster expand on mouseover, or show the full set of notifs for a topic when you click through and visit that topic.
5: Offering a few short words rather than ‘likes’
peripatetic writes:
Many people here in Humane Tech have complained about likes in general as being addictive. Personally I think they are shallow and create the problem that we are gamifying forums with addictive elements in the place of deeper conversation.
One big idea, I don’t know if its been done before. Give people the change to “react” to a post by typing say 3-10 words instead of doing a full reply. This would be used instead of likes. People would have a change to react in a meaningful way by typing “reactions” such as “Wonderful way you think”, “I agree in principle”, “Such beautiful colors in your photo” which is much more meaningful than a simple “like”. What do you think?
