Friendlier Related tab
Ticket
+issues
Related tab is confusing to almost all who see it.
+solution
Making the Related tab simpler and more useful for what people mostly use it for:
- Make each section into its own submenu tab, and implement them as cards. Designing in-place here:
- Cardtype+*context
- type+*rform: +type cards, +*tform (on type cards), link to create another (default on Cardtypes)
- Role+*context
- members:... — default
- *account+*context (i.e., in Related tab of cards with account extension; default for them):
- Role+*rform: +edits and roles
- *context
- community+*rform: +tags, +editors, +discussion (default on other cards)
- plusses+*rform: plus cards, (plus parts? they're in footer...)
- references+*rform: links and inclusions
- (config): +*rform (on cards that can have one, and plus cards whose right part has one), +*edit, +*new, +*options (Pointers), +*table of contents (on richtext cards) this whole card will probably have to be from code for now
- Cardtype+*context
- Use content rather than closed view, at least on some.
- Add explanatory text about what each list means (see Related tab)
This ticket subsumes add role, member, editor to Related tab and User contributions.
Changes made as part of this:
*cards linked to -> links
*cards linked from -> linkers
*cards included -> inclusions
*cards that include -> includers
Where *rform appears: currently it appears on all simple cards (only). I could make it appear on all plus cards, too, as the form for its tag...
Didn't get this on +*table of contents: "maybe this one is dynamically generated? lots of contingencies".
I just meant we couldn't do it with a virtual card. Currently +*table of contents appears on any card that inherits from Basic.
Are you thinking of the names of the star-cards above as the names of the submenu items? (I am)
Not currently, *account and *context are currently the only star-cards built into submenus, and both of those are pointers to menu items which are completely configurable, and so not star cards.
Appreciate the brevity of *accounts, but seems very undiscoverable. Best one-word option i came up with was *editing.
*account doesn't just mean editing, it means any information you want to include about the account associated with a card, like roles for example. So you could include multiple subtabs for cards with accounts via *account+*context (just like you could include multiple subtabs for any given cardtype). If you want one to be called editing, that may be ok, though edits seems more concise.
Similar discoverability concern with +*community. What if we made it +*discussion with just +discussion in it, and moved +*user editing to the Changes tab? (just under the Current Revision line?).
I don't want to mess with the changes tab on this release. It's due for an overhaul, but I don't want to tackle it piecemeal. In places where we want discussion to be more prominent, we can still include it on the main card itself. Would it help if we renamed "Related" to "Context"?
Formatting oddness: paragraph text is aligned a bit to the left of header text. (e.g. in plusses subtab of http://new.wagn.org/card/related/new )
K, I'll fix that.
On plus cards, we don't seem to list parts anywhere now. It's in the footer of every card anyway, so i'm fine with leaving it out (i don't think we have WQL syntax for doing it anyway - that may be useful for other things, so i added it to the Google doc).
We should have them somewhere, because it's very useful to be able to navigate through related cards (including and especially parts) without going to a new page. I think you're right that we can't currently do this through WQL, so I would need to do this in code somehow. The easiest thing would be to add them to config for now, but if you don't like that we can come up with another tab.
From the same thinking, i removed +*plus parts from plusses (which would maybe be better named plus cards?)
I don't get why the same thinking leads there. At any rate, the plus parts are pretty valuable in many contexts, and I think it's a great opportunity to make the relationships more discoverable. I don't know if you're going to like this, but I reverted most of plusses back to the way it was. In general I think we should put a value on short, clear titles that make it easy for experienced users to navigate visually, and then slightly more explicit explanatory text that helps newbies but is visually unobtrusive for returning users.
--John Abbe.....Wed Mar 25 18:46:52 -0700 2009
Tried to reformat the references subtab and ran into a couple of problems:
a) http://sandwagn.wagn.org/wagn/recursion_testing - Ticket?
I think the recursion thing is already ticketed. I explained the oddity on that card.
b) Do we have a way to suppress ToCs on rforms? This doesn't work: http://sandwagn.wagn.org/wagn/foo+*table_of_contents — see http://sandwagn.wagn.org/wagn/rform_tocs%2Bfoo
No we don't have a way, but I agree that we need one.
Suggest ticket, apply plus*toc on rforms to virtual cards
Yup, sounds good.
Ended up simplifying that tab in a way that made both irrelevant, but if we go back to something like what it was, these become relevant in the now.
Well, I much prefer it with just the two headers, for the same reason as above. Long sentence-like headers are noisy and hard to interpret.
I think we're overloading Related (or Context, if renamed it that). - JA
I agree, and we may shuffle a bit later, but I don't want to get into big re-writes of other tabs now. My sense is that we should use this simple strategy available to us to explore more discoverable interfaces cheaply. However, there is some potential cost to putting all of this into data, so caution is good.
Simplification suggestion: fold references and plusses back together into a "related" subtab (renaming Related to Context)
I wonder if you use the related tab differently from how I do, because it seems like you're getting rid of a lot of the parts that I really use and value. Why get rid of links and inclusions, or put them into link view so that you can't edit in place without losing your context? I guess the question we have to answer is whether all the parts I want are valuable enough to other people. If so, then there's probably more information there than we really want on one tab. If not, maybe we can shrink it down to one.
--John Abbe.....Thu Mar 26 05:00 -0700 2009
Looks like we'd need http://new.wagn.org/wagn/item+*rform to have _left-of-_left to make the typical formatting use case work - see the items subtab of http://new.wagn.org/card/related/friends+*rform
Hmm, true, if you wanted all of this to show up on *rform rather than on "Rname Card" (whatever it is). I guess that's probably where you want it? The base card is often not be a pointer, anyway. Isn't this the same as every other instance?
+*options (for Pointers) seems to fit more on the config subtab.
Maybe so. It would be nice not to hard-code too much in there, but I see your point. Let's do that for now.
I updated new to track all (except config) Related subtabs: http://new.wagn.org/wagn/new#And%20cards%20associated%20with%20the%20Related%20tab
Cool, though my purpose in putting together that "comprise" section was to be clear on what all the included cards were. There are 111 cards, what are they all?
Finished with (to me :-) non-big changes to http://wagn.org/wagn/Friendlier_Related_tab+discussion+Design
Suggest we move that card to new (and add to *ignore)
Lost earlier, longer comment and no energy to rewrite now.
--John Abbe.....Tue Apr 07 22:00:28 -0700 2009
Edited http://johnabbe.wagn.org/wagn/*references+*rform but it's not reflected on the Related tab.
--John Abbe.....Sat Apr 11 21:28:48 -0700 2009
http://en.indecks.net/wagn/new is the new new; we're calling it English (in anticipation of other languages).
--John Abbe.....Sat Apr 11 21:29:36 -0700 2009
http://johnabbe.wagn.org/card/related/geek seems way less busy, and more integrated than what we have now. Also made it the default over community, since i use it more than the other subtabs, and it seems more likely to be what's expected by "Related". (Don't like "associated" but not sure what else to call it.)
--John Abbe.....Thu Apr 23 16:27:49 -0700 2009
It's definitely tighter. Here's why I like the current setup more:
1. I use *inclusions, *links, and *plus parts all the time
2. I think it does a better job of explaining plus cards to someone who doesn't understand them
3. I don't like the long titles. To me they make the visual zoom harder.
More ambivalent about the community tab being default. I don't use it as much either, but I think it's less scary.
I'm kind of tired of discussing this one. Guess we let Lew make the call about what to do for now and plan to get more feedback from all major user groups (new users, power users, wagneers, etc.)
--Ethan McCutchen.....Thu Apr 23 17:10:47 -0700 2009