The “open stuff in a modal overlay page on top of the feed rather than linking normally, incidentally making the URL bar useless” is super confusing and annoying. Just now, when I tried to use my usual trick of Open Link in New Tab for getting around confusingly overridden navigation on the “Click to view all comments” link to this very thread, it wasn’t an actual link at all.
I don’t know how to interpret what’s going on when I’m only shown a subset of comments in a feed section and they don’t seem to be contiguous. Usually I feel like I’m missing context, fumble around with the controls that seem related to the relationships between comments to try to open the intervening ones, still can’t tell whether I’m missing things (I think the indentation behavior is different? How do I tell how many levels there are between two comments that look like they have a parent^N relationship?), and wind up giving up and trying to find a good thread parent to see in its entirety.
Cheers for the feedback, I apologize for confusing and annoyingness.
What do you mean by “makes the URL bar useless”? What’s the use you’re hoping would still be there? (typing in a different address should still work
The point of the modals is they don’t lose your place in the feed in a way that’s hard technically to do with proper navigation, though it’s possible we should just figure out how to do that.
And ah yeah, the “view all comments” isn’t a link on right-click, but I can make it be so (the titles are already that). That’s a good idea.
All comment threads are what I call a “linear-slice” (parent-child-child-child) with no branching. Conveying this relationship while breaking with the convention of the rest of the site (nesting) has proven tricky, but I’m reluctant to give up the horizontal space, and it looks cleaner. But two comments next to each other are just parent/child, and if there are ommitted comments, there’s a bar saying “+N” that when clicked, will display them.
Something I will do is make it so the post-modal and comments-modal is one, and when you click to view a particular comment, you’ll be shown it but the rest will also be there, which should hopefully help with orienting.
What do you mean by “makes the URL bar useless”? What’s the use you’re hoping would still be there?
The URL is externalized mental context on which article I’m currently viewing, and it’s also common for me to copy the link out to use elsewhere. Previously it would stay the URL of the front page—I think that’s been changed since I wrote that, though.
The point of the modals is they don’t lose your place in the feed in a way that’s hard technically to do with proper navigation, though it’s possible we should just figure out how to do that.
Yeah, though as a desktop browser user, I already have a well-practiced way of doing that, which is to open stuff in new tabs if I want to keep my place. I would imagine doing a pre-link-following replacement of the history state to include an anchor that restores my position on Back would allow true top-level navigation here? Or, stashing the “read up to X so far” state somewhere seems to be a common thing. (You’ve presumably thought of all that already.)
All comment threads are what I call a “linear-slice” (parent-child-child-child) with no branching.
Yeah, I figured it out eventually. It does seem tricky to get a good presentational design here; I don’t know of a great way to convey that difference in context, and I do feel like it’s awkward to remember the distinction or have to flip between the formats mentally when navigating around. Maybe if the visual frames were more distinct from the kind used in the nested-comments interface it’d be easier to remember that the chain isn’t siblings?
Without having made much adaptation effort:
The “open stuff in a modal overlay page on top of the feed rather than linking normally, incidentally making the URL bar useless” is super confusing and annoying. Just now, when I tried to use my usual trick of Open Link in New Tab for getting around confusingly overridden navigation on the “Click to view all comments” link to this very thread, it wasn’t an actual link at all.
I don’t know how to interpret what’s going on when I’m only shown a subset of comments in a feed section and they don’t seem to be contiguous. Usually I feel like I’m missing context, fumble around with the controls that seem related to the relationships between comments to try to open the intervening ones, still can’t tell whether I’m missing things (I think the indentation behavior is different? How do I tell how many levels there are between two comments that look like they have a parent^N relationship?), and wind up giving up and trying to find a good thread parent to see in its entirety.
Cheers for the feedback, I apologize for confusing and annoyingness.
What do you mean by “makes the URL bar useless”? What’s the use you’re hoping would still be there? (typing in a different address should still work
The point of the modals is they don’t lose your place in the feed in a way that’s hard technically to do with proper navigation, though it’s possible we should just figure out how to do that.
And ah yeah, the “view all comments” isn’t a link on right-click, but I can make it be so (the titles are already that). That’s a good idea.
All comment threads are what I call a “linear-slice” (parent-child-child-child) with no branching. Conveying this relationship while breaking with the convention of the rest of the site (nesting) has proven tricky, but I’m reluctant to give up the horizontal space, and it looks cleaner. But two comments next to each other are just parent/child, and if there are ommitted comments, there’s a bar saying “+N” that when clicked, will display them.
Something I will do is make it so the post-modal and comments-modal is one, and when you click to view a particular comment, you’ll be shown it but the rest will also be there, which should hopefully help with orienting.
Thanks again for writing up those thoughts!
The URL is externalized mental context on which article I’m currently viewing, and it’s also common for me to copy the link out to use elsewhere. Previously it would stay the URL of the front page—I think that’s been changed since I wrote that, though.
Yeah, though as a desktop browser user, I already have a well-practiced way of doing that, which is to open stuff in new tabs if I want to keep my place. I would imagine doing a pre-link-following replacement of the history state to include an anchor that restores my position on Back would allow true top-level navigation here? Or, stashing the “read up to X so far” state somewhere seems to be a common thing. (You’ve presumably thought of all that already.)
Yeah, I figured it out eventually. It does seem tricky to get a good presentational design here; I don’t know of a great way to convey that difference in context, and I do feel like it’s awkward to remember the distinction or have to flip between the formats mentally when navigating around. Maybe if the visual frames were more distinct from the kind used in the nested-comments interface it’d be easier to remember that the chain isn’t siblings?
Thanks for continuing to try to improve the site!