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Weekly update, 26 May
Good afternoon, Dreamwidthians! ...Okay, okay, it's evening where I am, and morning elsewhere in the world, and and and ... but you know what I mean.
This week's update is late because I was busy getting married! (Okay, not so busy -- it was just a simple courthouse ceremony. But still.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sarah said that she doesn't work on days she gets married, and I happen to agree.) Then, as I was settling in to gather things for the update, something big happened. Like, huge. Big enough to blow away everything else I was going to talk about in the rest of this update.
Before I get to that, though, a quick hit: welcome topoulpette, who has had her first patches committed! (Two, to be exact.) Also, this month we're running a Clean Up The Small Stuff hackathon in an attempt to knock down our open bug count. So, if you've been considering getting involved, now would be a great time. (Come to the dark side. We have cookies.)
Still, all of this pales next to ...
Yes, that's right.fu has been working her fingers off to turn my crappy pencil sketches into an actual semi-usable mockup. This mockup doesn't work to actually post entries to your journal, and you can't use any of the draft entries/scheduled entries functions yet (since it's not yet finished!), but it will let you play with it and figure out what you love about it and what things you think can still be improved.
Before I link to it, though, we need some background.
The reason for this redesign is to make it possible -- and easy -- to have draft and scheduled entries in the future. This means that you'll be able to:
a). Work on multiple entries at once, save the entries you haven't finished yet, and keep them in your DW account instead of in a file on your computer somewhere.
b). Schedule finished entries for posting sometime in the future, so that you don't actually have to be in front of your account at a certain time in order to post an entry. For instance, if you're going on vacation, you'll be able to write a week's worth of entries ahead of time and they'll post right on schedule.
c). Set a particular entry to post at specified intervals (daily, weekly, monthly) so if you post the same text every week, you don't have to remember that it's Monday again. (Something I am clearly failing at, seeing as how the Monday update is on Wednesday this week!)
d). Temporarily "unpublish" entries back to draft status, instead of deleting them or setting them to Private, so that if you want to revise an entry after you post it, you can do so and still keep the same URL and privacy settings when the entry is republished.
We've also tried to improve on the general usability of the update page, group the metadata settings into logical categories, modernize the interface and add some useful tricks (better tag autocomplete, for instance, and the ability to hide certain metadata sections that you never use and have that choice remembered when you load the update page).
When we asked you a while back what you wanted in the update page, and in the conversations we've been having with people about the topic since, the chief things that were mentioned were:
* Prominence of the icon selection, security, and date/time options.
* Good keyboard navigability.
* Better tagging options.
* The ability to hide unused or less-frequently-used options, but still have access to them if needed on an entry-by-entry basis.
The design that we came up with fits these criteria as much as we could. It borrows heavily from the Wordpress posting interface, because when we were looking around at all of the available options out there, the Wordpress one was the closest to what we wanted. It's far from being an exact clone, though, because on DW, the focus is entirely on different things.
Another major thing this redesign does: Because we have so many options for posting an entry, it can be totally overwhelming for new people, but everyone uses a different set of those options and therefore we can't get rid of any of them (or hide them, or put them behind another click for an 'advanced options' page) without annoying somebody. So, for all of the more advanced options, we went with a simple JS trick: the settings for the option won't show up until you select the option, thus saving space and simplifying the process for new people, but they aren't hidden behind a further click to avoid annoying the people who use them regularly.
The major thing that we did even though a few people said we shouldn't: the design uses a two-column design, rather than a one-column design, even though some people said that they'd find a two-column version annoying. There are two reasons we went with this design rather than a one-column one:
1). Our usage data shows that under 1% of our users access the site at a screen resolution under 1024x768. At this resolution, the entry-typing area is still about 70% of the existing update page entry-typing area, and the two-column option allows us to make more of the metadata options visible on the first screenload.
2). A survey I did a while back about the order in which people write entries turned up that everyone does things slightly differently. We wanted to optimize the design for the most common workflow, except there wasn't really a most common workflow! Because of that, we needed to build a version that people could adapt to their own preferred workflow without too much doubling back, and a two-column option means that most of the common workflow items can be visible on the screen at the same time for people to select.
For those users who are accessing DW on a mobile device with a much smaller screen: We are, as part of an unrelated project, working on a redesign of our mobile site. (One of the Summer of Code projects is also an iPhone client.) This will make it easier for you to use the update page on a mobile screen. The design also degrades gracefully into a one-column version if the working screen space is small enough, so users on small devices and low resolutions will still have a large enough working space.
The design is also meant to degrade gracefully if Javascript is off.
* The design should be fully keyboard-navigable and screenreader-friendly. We've checked it with the accessibility team, but if it isn't for you, that's a bug and we want to know about it!
* To collapse boxes, hit the arrow in the top left corner. To expand a box and make it larger -- to have more room to type in things like tags and "current mood/music/etc", click the
magnifying glass next to the text entry box.
* If your computer is older or slower, and you're having trouble with the Javascript used to create the various zoom effects, there's a "disable effects" link in the upper right hand corner of the page that will shut those off.
* To choose a custom time to display on the entry, select "Custom" for "Displayed Entry Time" under Date & Time. To schedule a post for the future, select "in the future" for "Scheduled Publishing Time" under Date & Time. A calendar will pop up for scheduling. Tabbing or clicking outside the calendar will dismiss it. (This is one of the things I'm most nervous about. We don't want to lose the ability to make the entry display a date that isn't "now", but we're going to be introducing the concept of "entry posted in the future at a time other than now", and I'm a little nervous that the distinction isn't clear enough. But more about that later.)
* The "Works in Progress" bin will show you draft posts and scheduled posts. Scheduled posts display with both absolute and relative time, and the
icon indicates that it's scheduled to be posted regularly and not just once. Under the Draft column, "draft" means that it's never been published, and "retracted" means that it was published once but then pulled back for more revision.
* To pick a custom security level (custom filter the entry), select "Custom" under the "Security Level" in the Publishing area. A series of checkboxes for your defined custom filters (or, in this case since it's a mockup, some sample custom filters) will show.
* Preview and Spellcheck are under the Other Actions box, which is collapsed by default as a demonstration of how the collapse-on-load will work -- it won't be collapsed by default the first time you load the new update page when it's live on the site.
* To save as a draft, you'd select "Draft" under "Publishing Status" (in Publishing), then the "Post Entry" button.
So, the purpose of showing you this mockup is to get your feedback now, before we release it on the userbase as a whole! This means that this is the part where I ask you guys what you love about the design and what you think could be better.
Your feedback is important to us, because we want you to be as comfortable as possible with the new design when we release it. It's really important for me to note, though, that the overall design won't be changing, because we chose it for very specific reasons. This means that feedback like "I hate the whole thing and you shouldn't change anything about the existing page" won't be helpful for us -- if you dislike a part of the redesign, tell us the specific pieces you don't like about it, and why, so we can see if there's another way of doing the same thing that will be more widely useful for people.
(Also, before anyone asks: Because this redesign is to allow more functionality, there also won't be any chance to opt out of the redesign and keep using the old update page. It's necessary for us to standardize on one design, especially since we're going to be making sweeping changes to the backend that you guys won't see but will require us to use the new update form to create posts.)
If you're stuck on the kind of feedback you want to give, here are some questions you might want to answer. (You don't have to answer them -- this is just a sample of the kind of things we want to hear!)
* Does your computer/browser display any elements of the page wrongly? (If it does: please let us know what browser (and browser version) and operating system, and what screen resolution, you're using.)
* Is there enough visual distinction to the "Works in progress" bin? If you don't think so, what do you think would improve it?
* Is the distinction between "timestamp on the entry", aka "displayed entry time", and "time the entry will be posted", aka "scheduled posting time", clear enough for you? If it isn't, what can you think of that might make it more instinctive?
* If you use assistive technology: Does this design work for you in it? Is there anything that annoys you about it? Is there anything that's actively hard to work with about it? If so, let us know, and let us know specifically what assistive tech you're using so we can try to reproduce.
* After trying it out a few times, is there anything about the workflow that seems off or wrong to you? Are there any little details of the process that you think will quickly get annoying?
* Is the process of saving a draft, instead of posting the entry directly to your journal, clear enough?
* And, finally, becausefu worked her butt off on this and needs some positive feedback to focus on in the middle of all the critique: What're your favorite parts of the mockup?
So, after all that ... here's the link to the mockup!
Remember, this is only a demo. It will not post entries to your journal or save them as drafts, and it won't use your icons, your tags, or your custom filters.
There's a note on the page itself about what else it doesn't have, but to reiterate: the Rich Text Editor isn't integrated yet (since we're replacing it as part of a Summer of Code project), and neither is draft auto-save or functional preview/spellcheck. The links to the sample "draft" and "scheduled" posts don't work yet, either.
Try a few sample posts, bang around on it, see how it works, and let us know what could be better!
Without further ado ...
Create Entries Demo
Things that are coming up frequently in comments, that we will definitely look into changing/improving/etc, that are already on the list and don't need to be mentioned anymore:
* Moving the location of the 'tags' option -- nearly everyone who's commented would like that moved, and we'll play around with the best location.
* Tag autocomplete not working perfectly with mouse selection (typing 'ca' to get 'cake', selecting 'cake', and getting two tags of 'ca' and 'cake')
* Location of the spellcheck/preview buttons (please do note, though, that the box they're in right now would not be automatically collapsed when you load the page: the page will remember your last-used value) -- we'll play around and try to find a good solution. (We very much want to separate them, since a common complaint is that people hit post when they meant preview, but what we're hearing from you guys is that they're too separated.)
* The phrasing of the "Take out of normal date flow" box -- that was our best attempt to make the "date out of order" option clearer, since it's a source of much confusion, and we've apparently succeeded in making it worse!
* Requests for the ability to drag & reorder the modules -- I don't know if it'll be technically possible, but I'll havefu looking into how easy it would be!
Also, thank you guys so much for the thoughtful and incredibly helpful feedback and comments so far!
This week's update is late because I was busy getting married! (Okay, not so busy -- it was just a simple courthouse ceremony. But still.
sarah said that she doesn't work on days she gets married, and I happen to agree.) Then, as I was settling in to gather things for the update, something big happened. Like, huge. Big enough to blow away everything else I was going to talk about in the rest of this update.Before I get to that, though, a quick hit: welcome to
poulpette, who has had her first patches committed! (Two, to be exact.) Also, this month we're running a Clean Up The Small Stuff hackathon in an attempt to knock down our open bug count. So, if you've been considering getting involved, now would be a great time. (Come to the dark side. We have cookies.)Still, all of this pales next to ...
The Update Page Redesign Mockup
Yes, that's right.
fu has been working her fingers off to turn my crappy pencil sketches into an actual semi-usable mockup. This mockup doesn't work to actually post entries to your journal, and you can't use any of the draft entries/scheduled entries functions yet (since it's not yet finished!), but it will let you play with it and figure out what you love about it and what things you think can still be improved.Before I link to it, though, we need some background.
The Motivations
The reason for this redesign is to make it possible -- and easy -- to have draft and scheduled entries in the future. This means that you'll be able to:
a). Work on multiple entries at once, save the entries you haven't finished yet, and keep them in your DW account instead of in a file on your computer somewhere.
b). Schedule finished entries for posting sometime in the future, so that you don't actually have to be in front of your account at a certain time in order to post an entry. For instance, if you're going on vacation, you'll be able to write a week's worth of entries ahead of time and they'll post right on schedule.
c). Set a particular entry to post at specified intervals (daily, weekly, monthly) so if you post the same text every week, you don't have to remember that it's Monday again. (Something I am clearly failing at, seeing as how the Monday update is on Wednesday this week!)
d). Temporarily "unpublish" entries back to draft status, instead of deleting them or setting them to Private, so that if you want to revise an entry after you post it, you can do so and still keep the same URL and privacy settings when the entry is republished.
We've also tried to improve on the general usability of the update page, group the metadata settings into logical categories, modernize the interface and add some useful tricks (better tag autocomplete, for instance, and the ability to hide certain metadata sections that you never use and have that choice remembered when you load the update page).
The Requests
When we asked you a while back what you wanted in the update page, and in the conversations we've been having with people about the topic since, the chief things that were mentioned were:
* Prominence of the icon selection, security, and date/time options.
* Good keyboard navigability.
* Better tagging options.
* The ability to hide unused or less-frequently-used options, but still have access to them if needed on an entry-by-entry basis.
The design that we came up with fits these criteria as much as we could. It borrows heavily from the Wordpress posting interface, because when we were looking around at all of the available options out there, the Wordpress one was the closest to what we wanted. It's far from being an exact clone, though, because on DW, the focus is entirely on different things.
Another major thing this redesign does: Because we have so many options for posting an entry, it can be totally overwhelming for new people, but everyone uses a different set of those options and therefore we can't get rid of any of them (or hide them, or put them behind another click for an 'advanced options' page) without annoying somebody. So, for all of the more advanced options, we went with a simple JS trick: the settings for the option won't show up until you select the option, thus saving space and simplifying the process for new people, but they aren't hidden behind a further click to avoid annoying the people who use them regularly.
The Anti-Requests
The major thing that we did even though a few people said we shouldn't: the design uses a two-column design, rather than a one-column design, even though some people said that they'd find a two-column version annoying. There are two reasons we went with this design rather than a one-column one:
1). Our usage data shows that under 1% of our users access the site at a screen resolution under 1024x768. At this resolution, the entry-typing area is still about 70% of the existing update page entry-typing area, and the two-column option allows us to make more of the metadata options visible on the first screenload.
2). A survey I did a while back about the order in which people write entries turned up that everyone does things slightly differently. We wanted to optimize the design for the most common workflow, except there wasn't really a most common workflow! Because of that, we needed to build a version that people could adapt to their own preferred workflow without too much doubling back, and a two-column option means that most of the common workflow items can be visible on the screen at the same time for people to select.
For those users who are accessing DW on a mobile device with a much smaller screen: We are, as part of an unrelated project, working on a redesign of our mobile site. (One of the Summer of Code projects is also an iPhone client.) This will make it easier for you to use the update page on a mobile screen. The design also degrades gracefully into a one-column version if the working screen space is small enough, so users on small devices and low resolutions will still have a large enough working space.
The design is also meant to degrade gracefully if Javascript is off.
A few notes
* The design should be fully keyboard-navigable and screenreader-friendly. We've checked it with the accessibility team, but if it isn't for you, that's a bug and we want to know about it!
* To collapse boxes, hit the arrow in the top left corner. To expand a box and make it larger -- to have more room to type in things like tags and "current mood/music/etc", click the
magnifying glass next to the text entry box.* If your computer is older or slower, and you're having trouble with the Javascript used to create the various zoom effects, there's a "disable effects" link in the upper right hand corner of the page that will shut those off.
* To choose a custom time to display on the entry, select "Custom" for "Displayed Entry Time" under Date & Time. To schedule a post for the future, select "in the future" for "Scheduled Publishing Time" under Date & Time. A calendar will pop up for scheduling. Tabbing or clicking outside the calendar will dismiss it. (This is one of the things I'm most nervous about. We don't want to lose the ability to make the entry display a date that isn't "now", but we're going to be introducing the concept of "entry posted in the future at a time other than now", and I'm a little nervous that the distinction isn't clear enough. But more about that later.)
* The "Works in Progress" bin will show you draft posts and scheduled posts. Scheduled posts display with both absolute and relative time, and the
icon indicates that it's scheduled to be posted regularly and not just once. Under the Draft column, "draft" means that it's never been published, and "retracted" means that it was published once but then pulled back for more revision.* To pick a custom security level (custom filter the entry), select "Custom" under the "Security Level" in the Publishing area. A series of checkboxes for your defined custom filters (or, in this case since it's a mockup, some sample custom filters) will show.
* Preview and Spellcheck are under the Other Actions box, which is collapsed by default as a demonstration of how the collapse-on-load will work -- it won't be collapsed by default the first time you load the new update page when it's live on the site.
* To save as a draft, you'd select "Draft" under "Publishing Status" (in Publishing), then the "Post Entry" button.
The Feedback
So, the purpose of showing you this mockup is to get your feedback now, before we release it on the userbase as a whole! This means that this is the part where I ask you guys what you love about the design and what you think could be better.
Your feedback is important to us, because we want you to be as comfortable as possible with the new design when we release it. It's really important for me to note, though, that the overall design won't be changing, because we chose it for very specific reasons. This means that feedback like "I hate the whole thing and you shouldn't change anything about the existing page" won't be helpful for us -- if you dislike a part of the redesign, tell us the specific pieces you don't like about it, and why, so we can see if there's another way of doing the same thing that will be more widely useful for people.
(Also, before anyone asks: Because this redesign is to allow more functionality, there also won't be any chance to opt out of the redesign and keep using the old update page. It's necessary for us to standardize on one design, especially since we're going to be making sweeping changes to the backend that you guys won't see but will require us to use the new update form to create posts.)
If you're stuck on the kind of feedback you want to give, here are some questions you might want to answer. (You don't have to answer them -- this is just a sample of the kind of things we want to hear!)
* Does your computer/browser display any elements of the page wrongly? (If it does: please let us know what browser (and browser version) and operating system, and what screen resolution, you're using.)
* Is there enough visual distinction to the "Works in progress" bin? If you don't think so, what do you think would improve it?
* Is the distinction between "timestamp on the entry", aka "displayed entry time", and "time the entry will be posted", aka "scheduled posting time", clear enough for you? If it isn't, what can you think of that might make it more instinctive?
* If you use assistive technology: Does this design work for you in it? Is there anything that annoys you about it? Is there anything that's actively hard to work with about it? If so, let us know, and let us know specifically what assistive tech you're using so we can try to reproduce.
* After trying it out a few times, is there anything about the workflow that seems off or wrong to you? Are there any little details of the process that you think will quickly get annoying?
* Is the process of saving a draft, instead of posting the entry directly to your journal, clear enough?
* And, finally, because
fu worked her butt off on this and needs some positive feedback to focus on in the middle of all the critique: What're your favorite parts of the mockup?The Mockup
So, after all that ... here's the link to the mockup!
Remember, this is only a demo. It will not post entries to your journal or save them as drafts, and it won't use your icons, your tags, or your custom filters.
There's a note on the page itself about what else it doesn't have, but to reiterate: the Rich Text Editor isn't integrated yet (since we're replacing it as part of a Summer of Code project), and neither is draft auto-save or functional preview/spellcheck. The links to the sample "draft" and "scheduled" posts don't work yet, either.
Try a few sample posts, bang around on it, see how it works, and let us know what could be better!
Without further ado ...
Create Entries Demo
EDIT (5/27/10, 1024 EDT):
Things that are coming up frequently in comments, that we will definitely look into changing/improving/etc, that are already on the list and don't need to be mentioned anymore:
* Moving the location of the 'tags' option -- nearly everyone who's commented would like that moved, and we'll play around with the best location.
* Tag autocomplete not working perfectly with mouse selection (typing 'ca' to get 'cake', selecting 'cake', and getting two tags of 'ca' and 'cake')
* Location of the spellcheck/preview buttons (please do note, though, that the box they're in right now would not be automatically collapsed when you load the page: the page will remember your last-used value) -- we'll play around and try to find a good solution. (We very much want to separate them, since a common complaint is that people hit post when they meant preview, but what we're hearing from you guys is that they're too separated.)
* The phrasing of the "Take out of normal date flow" box -- that was our best attempt to make the "date out of order" option clearer, since it's a source of much confusion, and we've apparently succeeded in making it worse!
* Requests for the ability to drag & reorder the modules -- I don't know if it'll be technically possible, but I'll have
fu looking into how easy it would be!Also, thank you guys so much for the thoughtful and incredibly helpful feedback and comments so far!
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