Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

I like the improvements, but the instances of the word 'reply' seem to dominate the pages.

I wanted to see if anyone else had commented on this, but a quick page search turned up 71 instances of 'reply' so I couldn't sift through it. :)

Reply

  Reply
  Reply
  Reply 

Reply

  Reply

... okay I made my point. ;)

I still feel like the option to reply should be a right side of the screen option. Not left. Gmail's reply button is an image (arrow arcing to the left), located on the right hand side. Go with something like that. I keep confusing the text 'reply' as meaningful text I should be reading. It makes scanning clumsy to my eyes.

Also, there is still too much white space vertically. :(

I think part of the problem might be that this design gives too much prominence to 'who' is replying, vs. 'what' they are saying. So far, in wiki conversations, I care more about the content of the reply, and 'who' is replying is secondary. Wiki's are about the creation of content, other discussion forums (social media) are more about 'look at me' posting. I think if the design slid the author's names back to the end of posts, and didn't give them a separate line, everything would be more readable.

That and I keep wanting to reduce the font size by 5%. Too big! I'm not 80. :)

MarkJurgens: Thanks for this input. :)

Re: "reply" and "usernames" in the sidebar: The designers recently had a meeting about "things to potentially put at the righthand side" (to collate all our and their ideas, so far), so hopefully we'll get a synopsis of that, soon. Changes to the ongoing experimentation with UI layout are definitely possible/probable, and suggestions encouraged.

Re: fontsize: There's been a mention of both preferences, and in-page toggles (like NYTimes has in the top-right corner dropdown menu). Also with the ongoing Typography refresh, I assume they'll want to match the text sizing in that (Technically: currently the betafeature is using 0.875em, instead of the old/current 0.8em, which works out to 14px instead of 12.8px. Flow is currently using 16px). So, we shall see. :)

Quiddity (WMF): Just remember to prioritize content over interaction elements, and everything should work itself out. Reading is the primary action performed on talk pages - way above clicking on reply buttons.

This is not a newspaper article that must work for drive-by users, we expect editors to come back regularly to talk pages. For drive-by commentators, we already have the feedback box on articles themselves.

(I'm starting to become concerned with how frequently people from the WMF point out to newspapers and Q&A sites as their inspiration for the Flow design. Those sites are not designed at all to support a sustained conversation, so they're a terrible example to follow - their purpose is entirely different. Where are all the examples and comparisons with discussion forums such as phpBB, Discourse, the Slashdot beta -ok that one is not a good example-, etc?).

Diego Moya: I purely meant, for non-logged-in users, NYT has great typography options: http://i.imgur.com/7U3yAoF.png (I've seen this dropdown-for-text-sizing idea elsewhere, too, But NYT is the one I remember.) It was mentioned in regards to implementing it in Winter. Nothing to do with Flow - I was just wanting to indicate "preferences/options" regarding the large text, might solve it for everyone, because some people like it. :)

Also, Ha! at the Slashdot reference. Yeah...

Re: The feedback box on the articles: Nope, that's being disabled at the end of the month. See w:Wikipedia talk:Article Feedback Tool/Version 5#Article Feedback: Next Steps