Comment by KajMagnus
12 years ago
Hi hackers
I'm the link poster. I'm building a better (I hope) discussion system for blogs and forums, and perhaps (in the future) also for sites like Hacker News.
Here is the homepage: www.debiki.com
Here are possible future features: (so you can read about what might be focused on) http://www.debiki.com/-81101-future-features
What do you think? For example: Do you think the project makes sense? Or do you have any suggestions?
(It's a bit buggy in IE8; IE7 not supported.)
Kind regards, KajMagnus
(My first HN post :-))
Hey Kaj,
Nice work on the interface. It's definitely promising but you'll need a bunch more real life feedback.
You're playing with a lot of variables and I'm pretty sure some of them are interesting improvements, but some of them also don't work well and altogether it's not yet a better solution.
The main practical piece of advice I can give now is that having each new initial comment go horizontally doesn't seem to work well.
The other piece of advice is to keep going. ;) Good UX (which this is all about) is everything these days...
Thanks for your feedback!
What's the reason that having each new initial comment go horizontally doesn't seem to work well?
If you have time, I'd be interested in knowing what things you think are interesting improvements? And about other things, besides having comments go horizontally, that don't work well?
Horizontal comments mean horizontal scrolling and that is generally frowned upon for a number of reasons, such as:
* breaking a lot of existing layouts which assume 100% of the page is 100% of your screen (see your own demo page for example ;)
* users being unaware of it's existence or just not noticing the bar
* lack of hardware support (scroll buttons for most PCs are vertical only)
One quick win I see there is to let a horizontal comment take up very little space if it's completely.
As far as what works well:
* I like the click to improve (although I expect to improve just the area I click on / select)
* I love the click to scroll functionality; never seen that before and yet it feels very natural.
* I like the usage of lines in the comments. It's clear yet simple enough to still be elegant.
* Horizontal scrolling probably works well on mobile as well ;)
Send me an email if you want to stay in touch btw (see my profile) because I'm in a way on a similar path with our startup.
P.S. It might be a bit far out there, but I just ran across the AffectButton from Joost Broekens which might be interesting to use for giving feedback on mobile devices (see the Java applet on http://www.joostbroekens.com/)
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