Jan
6th
2013
Site Post » Feed update · 3:23pm Jan 6th, 2013
This is taking me a lot longer than expected because it's turning out to be quite difficult to design. Anyway, I thought I'd show where I was at with the content feed.
I have ditched the 2 column "timeline" layout. I feel the timeline is a very clever way of fitting more content on modern big displays but it did make things a little harder to follow for some people. More so than this, it made expanded content lose your place very easily. So instead I've gone with a single column layout the uses extra space for avatars. I would still like to make better use of horizontal space but we'll see.
New chapters in stories you're following show up in the feed as well.
Lastly, group additions now stack multiple groups into a single item.
Awsum!
It's cool, but I like the current one better. That one seems too much like Tumblr, and it's harder to find what you're looking for.
683710
What do you mean "what you're looking for"?. The page shows you new stuff from people you're following, you don't actually know what you want....unless you mean choosing between new stories / blog posts etc? In which case I'm working on that.
I do hope it can be collapsd, because that is a LOT of space. I like having the new chapters show up for favorites, though. Sometimes I miss seeing those.
Now if only there were a way to mark a story's chapter as completely read...
Hmm i really enjoy the idea knight , but i have a slight idea what if you moved it to the left wall so it doesn't just float in the middle of the screen, i haven't really noticed it but it causes a bit of eye strain.
683721
??
Ew, Tumblr.
All that space taken up by each blog entry or story update is gonna make it a bitch to find something if you've been gone awhile and have a bunch of updates to go through.
683715 That's pretty much what I meant.
683724
Like my previous post on this, that logic doesn't make sense. This isn't a searching page, it shows you new stuff.
683723
I have a tendency to listen to long stories on YouTube, then come back here to leave comments, ratings, what have you. Same goes for stories that were originally posted via EQD as GDocs. It would be great if I could just click a button and mark all of the chapters for a story as read, instead of clicking through one at a time.
683728
Oh, chapters
683715 Knight i can sort of see where here coming from with contactable options, I maby follow about 20 people but just think thats still allot of scrolling, what if you made it so their was a box with the image of their icon and the name of their post, and to view it you use a feature much like you would expanding an image in the comments, it would be simple and non clunky.
683733
Click the header and you'll see it contracts. That will be a toggleable default mode, it's just not finished yet.
I too think the current one is preferable. Could you give us a choice between the two views, like when browsing stories, a compact view and expanded view? (when browsing, I have been known to use both)
683730
I AM GOOD WRITE PONE HURRDURP
Hey, while I have your attention:
I would so love it if I didn't get "X has commented on your Y" notifications along with "X has replied to your comment on Y".
I have also always thought it would be great if there were a way to see how high a story has gotten in the popularity ranks, even if only for those in the top 200 or whatever. Not that I know how feasible that is. Just want to get the idea in your head for when you're not busy. :V
Would there be a way to view it by oldest unread first? If it has to have the newest up top, it will make it a bitch to resume reading them if you don't gte to them all at once.
A suggestion on two columns; if you separate them based on content (blogs on col1, group messages on col2, for instance) it could look okay. Just a thought.
I personally don't like it. Before, I could look over multiple notifications with relative ease and sort through them at a glance. Now I have to scroll and filter look through insignificant bits as I look for something that might require my attention.
683735 Huh great idea, though how about you see how having them all contracted from the login looks, also how do you feel about personalized options? Such as having an option of being able to make the site look like how you want, having the site how it is now would make a great default, but maby having to options to enable the word counter or boxes you can click to make it look more to your liking, along with saveing a bit of flack what better a way to have a simpler site to use than if the people using the site could twist it to their needs?
Any chance this page could have an RSS or Atom feed?
k
683811
This please.
Why does the collapsed view still take up twice to three times as much room as the current notification views? It would be nice to collapse stuff into one line like it's currently displayed.
The concept is nice, but the amount of scrolling done with even my small number of followed people is concerning. If the option to collapse by default is added, it would go a long way towards easing the "this is tumblr" look.
I also agree with PP. Getting a "replied to" and "commented on" together always seemed weird. Not enough to really complain about, but odd.
You compared it to da last time. I do enjoy the ability to separate out "comments on my work (and faves)" from "somebody or group you watched just added 458976345897 crappy pinkie pie screen edits". So I am really looking forward to comments and replies being easier to separate out from blogs and new fics.
683836
See I don't get this complaint. I just had a look at your feed and you have a grand total of THREE scrolls of my mouse wheel worth of items in the last day. Why does it need to be super ultra compact?
683889 I'm on a laptop and so don't use a scroll wheel, so I can see where kits is coming from. It's nice to be able to see everything on one page.
Feedback!
This feels much cleaner and easier to read than the timeline idea (Though that did have pros and cons) And I wish you luck on being able to expand the boxes, having so much empty space on either side feels wasted. The large avatars are a nice touch.
I'd also like to be able to sort things into groups, for example all group activity is together, all story updates/blog posts are together and any comment replies/watches are together. Having them all mixed up is nice for the timeframe but regularly I'll hop on and just want to check a blog post or somesuch and have to wade through everything. I know that may be a pain to code in though so it's not a major need, just a "It'd be nice" kinda thing.
You're working hard Knighty and it's appreciated. Thanks for letting us have a say on how the new site will look.
This layout feels a bit too tumblr-ish for my tastes. I'm also not sure where on it comment notifications and stuff would go.
I do have a suggestion about the horizontal space, though: You could have feed column that looks like the feed in this post that has story/blog/group updates, and then a second column beside it that looks more like the the current notification page, where all the comments/faves/watches notifications go. That way you could look at each column and know at a glance what stuff has updated rather than having to scroll down to find all the comments and stuff.
Also, I definitely agree that I'd want everything to be collapsed by default; when I look at the notifications, the only info I really need is the name of what's been updated, and who updated it. If I'm interested enough to read it, I'll click it; there's no reason to eat up a bunch of space with paragraphs of text under it. I know that there isn't much scrolling involved, but honestly I think that ideally you shouldn't have to scroll at all; you'd just open the page and be able to see every notification that you've received since the last time you checked.
One thing that confuses me is that it seems like people went "ew" at the Facebook layout, and now they're going "ew" at the Tumblr layout. You realize that it's basically impossible to actually make a wholly original page layout and that these websites do what they do for a reason, right? I'm not accusing you guys of not knowing what you want, and even something as simple as "ew" can be valuable feedback, but I'm not really sure what you guys want out of this design.
Just be glad it's not timeline, okay?
I'm slightly confused... is this 'Feed' going to be it's own thing, or is this intended to eventually replace the current Notifications setup?
[Edit] Oh, I just noticed the items collapse into a much more compact form when you click their tops. In a theoretical final build, would there be an option have the whole page begin collapsed, so I could enlarge any that I actually care about as I'm browsing them? That'd be optimal, and I'd fully accept it as a Notifications replacement.
Regardless of what your design is, I appreciate what you do for this site. You don't seem to get as much appreciation as you should, which is a shame. Thank you knighty for everything that you do and have done for this site!
If you put the picture in the header, before other information, for each section you can fit two side by side and thus not waist space.
How about letting users switch back and forth between the two?
684048 I can't speak for anyone else, but what I want from the layout is to have all the notifications summarized and condensed into one page so at a glance I can get a summary of everything. I can't really comment on the timeline since I haven't used facebook in forever, but my issue with the tumblr layout is basically that it takes something that uses up one line of text ("X updated their blog with Y") in the current notification system and expands it. Granted, if it's collapsible by default it isn't much of a problem, but seems like an unnecessary addition; it doesn't really add any new functionality. That's what the current system has over the proposed versions: I can just look at it, see "X comments, X updates, X whatever".
In all honesty, I'm not really sure how the proposed layout is an improvement over the current one other than making it prettier. I do think that there are issues with the current system (getting two notifications when somebody responds to your comment, for example), but I'd rather just see those issues fixed than have the notification thingy completely overhauled.
684094
Please refer to http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/108394/potential-upcoming-notification-changes
This is only taking over notifications for stories, blog posts and group additions. Comments/faves/watches all go to the usual notification page. And you can't see the advantage of being able to see blog posts and stories information before clicking? I mean, if you don't care that's fine but how can you not see the inherent benefit in being able to do that?
If I might give my 2 cents? The point of notifications is to let a user know what's going on elsewhere on the website, right? Far, far more often than not, a user is going to load up the notifications page, just to immediately click a notification-provided link to go somewhere else on the website. That seems like wasted bandwidth, on a rather large scale considering how many daily users this website has, and how many times a day each of those users loads the notifications page just to immediately move on to some other page. Why not have a tiny collapsible vertical bar on the left side of the screen (or anywhere really) with a spartan list of notifications, accessible on any page? You could still have the notifications page for when people want a list with more information available at a glance, but if you got a single notification right now and wanted to go to that comment reply or blog post right away, some immediately accessible link to it would be more convenient for users, and I'd think healthier for the server with how less often people would be loading the entire notifications page just to immediately move on (though I could very easily be wrong about that; I admit my understanding of the technical aspects of running a website is lacking, to put it mildly).
Sorry if my 2 cents are completely worthless and just plain wrong, lol. I'm sure you get tons of people acting like they know better than you, and it probably gets irritating. I'm just putting my thoughts out there, not trying to insult or anything.
As long as there's an option to have everything collapsed as the default, I'm down with this.
Really, though, I think I'm just the kind of guy who prefers the totally minimalist style. I guess I'm more Blackberry than Apple when it comes down to design.
684099 Oh, right. That makes more sense.
683740 >I would so love it if I didn't get "X has commented on your Y" notifications along with "X has replied to your comment on Y".
Yus, this. dA does it right, so knighty can too
683889
My monitor isn't as big as yours. I guess it's a matter of perspective. Right now, I never have to scroll. If I already had too, maybe 'more scrolling' would be easier to take. FWIW, I use the compact theme for gmail too.
Mmh... Not bad.
I never used the old one nor did I ever know it existed. ;_;
Honestly, I actually like the whole new feed system. While I'm used to the current list one, I think I could quickly get used to the newer one.
Also, your avatar is really nice
On the section with group additions, I'd personally suggest sorting them by group. One thing I'm personally likely to be looking for there is all the fanfics recently added to groups I administer. (In fact, it'd be really nice if groups just had a "recent updates" section separate from notifications...)
Also, it's very common to have the same story listed being added to the same group multiple times in multiple folders. How about compacting that to one line?
Of course, another way to go would be to only have one entry for each story, and show which groups & folders that story has been added to there. Of course, that'd make looking by group even more difficult...
685384
Cover art is visible for stories....just not for chapters.
Well, this is definitely an improvement over the previous version. I have, however, immediately noticed a pretty big glitch: It provides new chapter updates for any fic I've ever favorited (or even followed before following and favoriting were merged), rather than only for ones on my favorites at this moment. As a result, I'm getting updates for a bunch of fics which I actually ragequitted reading ages ago.
One day, we will get our update.
ONE DAY
Can you even imagine the amount of people that now get to see those story titles? So much advert...
Will this feed be replacing any other page? I hope not, I have a rather big distaste for feeds.
Looks nice, but I'm getting entries for stories I don't seem to have favorited. The avatars are also utterly enormous on the mobile site (Opera Mini on an HTC One V).