Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Interactive Prototype/I liked it a lot - here's why/reply (5)

It's nice to counter some of the negative feedback, but we should also try really hard to think of suggestions for improvement. I agree that the prototype has many significant improvements and I'm glad that you highlighted the space issue as an area to improve. Hopefully Jorm does take that seriously as you suggest. It feels somehow very crowded partly due to the margins and large font. A minimalist version for those who have sharp eyesight and want to take in a lot of information quickly would be nice. I also agree with many of the other comments on this page (e.g., source editing for convenient wikilinking and stuff).

The floating "start new discussion" box is distracting and takes up a ton of space, making it a negative. There's tons of empty space to the right where you could float some sort of menu with various options, including even a table of contents which could be helpful. If I want to start a new discussion I'll have figured that out when I land on the page. Notably, the prototype squeezes the text into a fixed-width div of 798 pixels (at least on my laptop) whereas the status quo is a fluid div which generally ends up being significantly wider in general for me. I believe some research suggests that short widths are easier to read, but it comes at the expense of more scrolling. The empty space on the right could also be used, although I really like the idea of being able to minimize things if you're in the minimalist mood, which I often am.

I have a little trouble understanding how this is all going to fit together based on this prototype. Is there going to be any actual test server, where we can play and it will save? It seems that there's generally been a reluctance to let editors test in a test environment, which I don't understand.

On the higher-level, it would be nice to be able to tag discussions in some ways; there should also be more readily-available ways to list pages which are having a lot of discussion. Tagging discussions is somewhat unconventional (but see StackOverflow) but it could reduce siloing and could help editors meet other people. Often a user talkpage discussion will actually be related to a discussion on an article talkpage or an ANI talk, and tagging or linking these could help show the totality of the discussion.