Topic on Talk:Compact Personal Bar

closing this massive thread, feel free to open individual threads for new issues.

Hi folks, first, I have to say that I really like the direction you all are taking with the navigation bar, and I'm looking forward to when this is a standard feature on the site!

My suggestion: the outline around the user menu on the top right makes it look a little too much like the old search box, and generally looks like something that is inviting the user to type something in. I'd suggest making this look a little more button-like or menu-like. Perhaps removing the outline and adding an ellipsis?

RobLa-WMF: thanks Rob, two things that will help, I'm not sure if you were looking at the as-implemented version from http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/ or the images in the project page. Either way, the bounding box is currently a bit too rounded, is missing the drop down caret, and a bit too narrow, it feels like an input form, you're right.

When used in conjunction with the Fixed Header/Winter Prototype, its possible that the normal (non-hovered) state of the Compact Personal Bar may change subtly when integrated into the fixed header (likely no or only a partial outline).

Why was the Echo dialog removed with this update? I really liked the ability to access it without leaving the page I was on.

Ignore me, my reading comprehension skills are apparently not up to snuff.

Then the other issue I have is the Watchlist star being used to represent the Watchlist whilst the actionable Watchlist star is directly below it. This could be very confusing to users.

Nicereddy: Ah, also this will be resolved with the fixed header/winter work, we might have a slightly awkward time where there are two kinda close to each other for a bit, we can also investigate making there be a difference in "watchlist" and "watch/unwatch"

Nicereddy: Agreed.

The blue highlight is inconsistent with the scroll-over in the Flow dropdowns with the three-dot menus. I personally prefer the blue highlight to Flow's implementation, will Flow be updated to include this or are these considered different design patterns which shouldn't necessarily have the same scroll-over states?

Nicereddy: we can sync up on a hover that is consistent and logical, we'll probably keep the colors minimal here, where on Flow the colors carry a lot of meaning.

Why the current "User" icon? Mobile current uses this on Contribution/Watchlist/View history pages, which I personally prefer.

Nicereddy: we have an action item to switch to the new wikifont icons (using webfont based icons) some icons will change as soon as we make that change, a few of these are temporarily svgs to get us out the door.

(Sorry for the excessive feedback, I'm a bit nitpicky and figured it'd be easier to respond if I separated these thoughts into multiple comments)

All the other user flyouts (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) require action by the user to open, while this flyout opens on-hover. Perhaps you have a reason for it, but I'd prefer if it required user action.

Nicereddy we wanted to maintain 1 click access to use profile, and not duplicate it in the flyout, so click gets you to your profile, hover gets you everything else. Other sites that have similar UIs don't have that primacy of a 1 click action that we wanted to maintain.

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): "Other sites that have similar UIs don't have that primacy of a 1 click action that we wanted to maintain." - Of course, that might just be because the behavior is counter-intuitive ;-) I consistently end up on my user page (why the heck would I want to get to my *user* page?! Even the talk page would make more sense) when I try to view my watchlist, even though I actually *click* the watchlist.

I see a few options:

- remove the click action and always require a hover + move to select the user page (i.e. add 'user page' above 'my contributions',
- remove the click action, and always require click (open menu) + click (selection), or
- close the menu when 'user page' is clicked on -- then at least my muscles will learn not to click the menu.

Valhallasw, thanks for the ideas, we'll investigate some options and test them with users.

First of all: I really like the design of the new compact personal bar. It looks modern and elegant at the same time. What I would like to have added is kind of a ticker-function for the watchlist. It would be great to have a small field indicating the number of unviewed changes on my watchlist.

And just as a short reply to what Nicereddy has written above: I really appreciate one-click-access to all the functionalities hidden in the flyout. Hover seems to be the best choice for this. Regards, Plani (de.wiki)

Plani, thanks! glad you're liking it. We're investigating how to do what you're asking for as far as a watchlist unseen items count. Its apparently not an easy thing to get that count but we're working with the platform team to figure out how to do it. If you have a good, non-hacky way, get in touch with Juliusz

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): For a start it would already be nice to have some notification that watched articles changed at all, independent of the number of changed articles.

2003:63:2F67:9600:19AF:A821:6AFC:1F01: We're working on it, there are some new APIs we can play with to try to get this, but it wasn't historically something that was easy to do, so we'll have to do some investigating.

I thinking the first thing to change about Compact Personal Bar is to remove the link to "Privacy policy". It's just useless. If you want user to stop read the help page, the best way for me, it's to show a "Privacy policy" page, it's just boring. I don't think it is the good place for this link. I understand that for the foundation it is important, but I really think that there are plenty of others pages much useful on personal menu, who plenty of people will see very often.

Nouill, I totally get what you're saying, and the Privacy Policy is super important to the foundation and the users of the content wikis thats why we felt this would be a good location for it. Each item in the flyout has its own ID that you can hide with skin.css This item would likely not show on non-foundation wikis.

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): I wanted to raise the same thing. Two specific points:

Duplication: The privacy policy is already linked in the footer of every page, along with other important links such as the Disclaimers, so it doesn't seem necessary to include here. (Unless/until it's removed from there, for logged-in users.)

Irregular usage: I feel like the drop down should only contain links that are going to be used regularly, by at least a significant minority of users. Hence it makes slight sense to have the new "Help" link (which regulars might not use much, but some newcomers will (hopefully) consult regularly), but the Privacy policy is unlikely to be consulted regularly by anyone.

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): I would remove the Privacy entry, too. Why should a registered user read it? He should have read it before/while registering. And +1 for Quiddity, duplication and non-use, which is absolutely true as well.

2003:63:2F67:9600:19AF:A821:6AFC:1F01 & Quiddity, you're right Privacy and help are in other places…currently. With Winter and and other upcoming beta features, these could possibly be removed from those locations (left nav, footer) so we're using compact personal bar as a way to try out some possible new access point. That said, its a great point to think more critically about only having frequently accessed items in the flyout.

We're collecting data on clickthroughs for help and privacy items, but we'll need to analyze the information a bit further to determine what it means.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it very unusual (to not say annoying) that I do not must click but only hover the User menu in order do make it drop down. My experience from almost 20 years experience starting with Windows 3.1 up to 8 as well as several Linux desktop environments is: You always (on default settings at least) have to click in order to make a menu appear, so I'm extremely used to clicking menus. But now if I click the user menu the only thing that happens is that my user page appears along with leaving the current page - which is absolutely not what I want in most cases.

The username menu button looks like a search input field. Happened to me several times now that I clicked on it instead of the real search field which is directly below when wanting to enter an article name.

Order of buttons: previously the Notification button was leftmost, now it's rightmost (if one ignores the drop down menu) which I find confusing. I will get used to it, but maybe you should switch it to avoid anger when releasing the feature to all.

2003:63:2F67:9600:1802:1E3C:64A6:AD36, I'm looking at mediawiki.org and notifications is about 1/5 of the way from the left (3rd element from the left) of a total of 10 distinct links/items. With the next version of the design we'll be moving the notifications and messages to the far right, so they'll be in a fixed location irrespective of the length of your user name. Hope this help!

Clicking on the arrow should open the flyout, not one's user page. The point of the arrow is to indicate its a drop-down, so having it open something else is unintuitive.

Jay8g: That sounds reasonable, although I worry about mixing hover and click interaction to mean the same thing, and having two click targets so closely together that are clearly distinguished as separate targets. Any thoughts?

Jay8g, I just found this we'd planned on switching over to a CSS only but this would allow for a click, hover, and click+drag to activate items in the flyout.