I don’t know what design process led to this, but even after all these years it throws me off every time.
One of the reasons is search indexing. Another reason is that scrolling precisely to a position in a comment tree is just very hard. Users scroll before the full page is loaded, and whenever I do user interviews with the in-context link version people fail to actually identify what comment they were linked to like 30% of the time. I think there probably must be some clever and good UI solution, but I haven’t found one after a few dozen hours of trying.
You could try it on HN: go to any user’s comments page, choose any comment and click its “context” link. It’ll load the page and jump to the right place. To experience the “scroll before load” problem you’ll have to work pretty hard. And it’s plain old server side rendering, with an SPA you have strictly more control, you can even blink the page into existence scrolled to the right place. And if you want even more clarity, you can highlight the linked-to comment.
It does indeed work pretty well on desktop. However, doing this on my Iphone produced the following result screen:
I could not confidently tell you which comment I was supposed to be linked to. All three visible comments at the top of the screen strike me as candidates.
Does the viewport at least contain the target comment? If yes, maybe highlighting it would solve the rest of the problem? (And it might help on desktop too, if the target comment is near the bottom of the page and we can’t scroll far enough to line it up with top of screen.)
Yeah, the correct one is the one by “scrik” at the top of the page.
Agree that highlighting might fix it, but it’s surprisingly tricky to find a way to highlight it that people will interpret as “this is the comment that you were linked to”.
I overall agree it’s all somehow probably doable, but I have struggled with making something that actually works without spending a lot of time on it.
One of the reasons is search indexing. Another reason is that scrolling precisely to a position in a comment tree is just very hard. Users scroll before the full page is loaded, and whenever I do user interviews with the in-context link version people fail to actually identify what comment they were linked to like 30% of the time. I think there probably must be some clever and good UI solution, but I haven’t found one after a few dozen hours of trying.
GW deals with this by blocking scrolling and blanking out the page until the relevant anchor tag has loaded.
You could try it on HN: go to any user’s comments page, choose any comment and click its “context” link. It’ll load the page and jump to the right place. To experience the “scroll before load” problem you’ll have to work pretty hard. And it’s plain old server side rendering, with an SPA you have strictly more control, you can even blink the page into existence scrolled to the right place. And if you want even more clarity, you can highlight the linked-to comment.
It does indeed work pretty well on desktop. However, doing this on my Iphone produced the following result screen:
I could not confidently tell you which comment I was supposed to be linked to. All three visible comments at the top of the screen strike me as candidates.
Does the viewport at least contain the target comment? If yes, maybe highlighting it would solve the rest of the problem? (And it might help on desktop too, if the target comment is near the bottom of the page and we can’t scroll far enough to line it up with top of screen.)
Yeah, the correct one is the one by “scrik” at the top of the page.
Agree that highlighting might fix it, but it’s surprisingly tricky to find a way to highlight it that people will interpret as “this is the comment that you were linked to”.
I overall agree it’s all somehow probably doable, but I have struggled with making something that actually works without spending a lot of time on it.