A couple of UX improvements

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A couple of UX improvements

Postby CarrieVS » Thu Apr 09, 2015 9:38 am

I've noticed a couple of things that are a bit dodgy and could do with changing if it's within our control.

The first one is the 'reply to sender and all recipients' link on a PM with more than one recipient:

replyToAll.JPG
replyToAll.JPG (18.14 KiB) Viewed 11771 times


As you can see, it's styled differently to the other two options, as a link rather than a button - without any non-linked text immediately by it for contrast so it can be hard to notice that it's a link without hovering - and with that chevron that appears to be pointing at the two buttons.

I guess the intention was probably to discourage people from using reply to all when it's not necessary by making reply more prominent, but the styling makes it look rather like a description appended to the other buttons, suggesting that 'reply' will reply to all. As often as not in a PM conversation between several people I find that people reply just to the sender even when it would make sense to reply to everyone (today I received a reply clearly addressed to the other person in the conversation as well as to me, but only sent to me).

This is on Alpha, I don't know what it looks like on ProSilver.

Is the styling of this in our control? Could we perhaps make it appear as a button, or at least remove the chevron?



The second thing is the [hr] tag. The fact that you have to use two tags, and especially that you have to fill in some text, which won't show up or affect the result in any way, between them to make a horizontal rule, when the html is just a single tag <hr/>, is not exactly user friendly.
Code: Select all
[hr]-[/hr]


The subject came up on another forum I visit, and a friend tells me that the phpBB forums she's been on have just a single [hr] tag for a horizontal rule. Would this be possible/relatively simple to change? Ideally so that either syntax worked, so as not to break existing posts.
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Re: A couple of UX improvements

Postby Marcuse » Thu Apr 09, 2015 10:18 am

I agree these two things would be useful changes, though I have no idea how to achieve this or how it would be implemented. I'll leave it to the more technical people to sort that out.
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Re: A couple of UX improvements

Postby CarrieVS » Thu Apr 09, 2015 10:37 am

I was mainly aiming this thread at Avi, I guess. But I thought it would be more sensible to make a suggestion thread rather than do it by PM, so people can see it and have an opinion if they want to. Or bring up other things they might have noticed.

Incidentally, the bug with attachments not showing up if they're not placed inline, has anyone ever looked at whether we can fix that?
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Re: A couple of UX improvements

Postby Dr. Ambiguous » Thu Apr 09, 2015 11:44 am

The PM thing looks basically the same on prosilver. And I agree, it's weird, and probably better off as a button. I'm not sure though if we're able to modify things in the UCP or not though. (If so, I want to be able to have more PM folders, apparently I get capped at, I think, 4. Found that out tonight). I recall asking avi about some semi-similar change to the UCP awhile back, and I think we weren't able to, but I'll let him answer more definitely.

As for the [hr] tag, I'm almost certain that's something that we can change. It's wonky, and weird, and I'd like to see that change too. Though, I think we should keep the old version for legacy purposes as well.
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Re: A couple of UX improvements

Postby CarrieVS » Thu Apr 09, 2015 12:11 pm

If it turns out we can't fix the PM reply thing, perhaps it might be worth mentioning it in your forum guide.

Without knowing what it was that we tried to change in the UCP before, it may be that content/functionality changes can't be made there but styling changes can - I don't really know how much control we have over the site's styling in general.

As for the number of PM folders you can have, whether we can change that could well be independent of whether we can change the styling - it's a functionality change, but it's only a maximum value, so it's possible that it's configurable.

If we're on the subject, I'd really love either the ability to make a folder act like a 'sent' folder rather than like an 'inbox folder', or for folders to show the 'to' of a message instead of the 'from' if the 'from' is me, but I very much doubt we can change that.
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Re: A couple of UX improvements

Postby Dr. Ambiguous » Thu Apr 09, 2015 12:25 pm

I may just be misunderstanding you, but if you click on "Outbox" or "Sent Messages" it shows the "To" instead of your own name, as a "From."

The changes I wanted were some pretty big ones, so it's very possible that they weren't possible, and some/all of these are. But again, I'll have to let avi weigh in.

Edit: I also agree on adding those details to the forum guide. Progress on that has slowed down a bit, as I've gotten a bit busier than I expected.
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Last edited by Dr. Ambiguous on Thu Apr 09, 2015 12:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A couple of UX improvements

Postby CarrieVS » Thu Apr 09, 2015 12:29 pm

Yes, the outbox and sent folders do that, but I want new folders that I create to be able to act like a 'sent' folder. If I want to put, say, all my messages relating to a mafia game in a mafia folder for easy reference, then I get about a million messages telling me that they're from me, and have to open each one to see which was which.

A setting on the folder would be fine, I could have a 'mafia - sent' and a 'mafia - received' folder, but I guess the ideal would be that user-created folders showed 'to' if the sender was the user, and 'from' otherwise. But I highly doubt that is in our control.
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Last edited by CarrieVS on Thu Apr 09, 2015 12:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A couple of UX improvements

Postby Dr. Ambiguous » Thu Apr 09, 2015 12:30 pm

Ah. Yes, I would like that option to as well. I ended up leaving all my sent mafia messages in my Outbox since I wasn't able to configure that.
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Re: A couple of UX improvements

Postby CarrieVS » Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:43 pm

aviel wrote:I thought we could do subscripts, but apparently we couldn't. So I added tags for superscripts and subscripts, e.g. Tn, ex.


I haven't had occasion to use the [sup] tag in a while, but I did the last couple of days and I noticed it's only very fractionally up so that you wouldn't even notice unless you were looking carefully for it. Although it seems it is better in Edge (I don't have Firefox on my home PC, am using Chrome.)

It's not a big deal; don't anyone bother themselves about it unless they've nothing more important to do.

Tinkering in the browser dev tools indicates that taking off the vertical-align and letting the default style for <sup> tags handle it works fine at least on Chrome, or setting the vertical-align, counter-intuitively, to text-bottom. And I can't see that position does anything.
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Re: A couple of UX improvements

Postby Learned Nand » Wed Jun 20, 2018 1:28 am

I think it may used to have been the case that the manual styling was required, but the tags look good now without it, so I've removed the inline styling.
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Re: A couple of UX improvements

Postby CarrieVS » Wed Jun 20, 2018 9:04 am

Thanks Avi!
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