Comment by KajMagnus

12 years ago

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?

2 comments

KajMagnus

Reply
mtrimpe  12 years ago

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/)

  • KajMagnus  12 years ago

    Yes horizontal scrolling would break the layout of many blogs and websites — I think this is somewhat niched software.

    Making people understand that they can dragscroll rightwards with the mouse is a bit tricky indeed. Right now I'm thinking about a big arrow pointing rightwards, at the right end of the page, that shows a helpful tips on click. — There's actually a popup-dialog-tips already, if you use the horizontal scrollbar, without first having dragscrolled. But people sometimes won't notice that popup-tips-dialog.

    Thanks for mentioning what you like, so I can continue improving that. (I also would like to edit only the paragraph I click on.)

    I read about the AffectButton, but I haven't yet installed Java plugin (I somewhat fear viruses). Anyway it gave me ideas about using smileys instead of stars, to indicate to what degree a comment is Interesting or Funny, hmm.

    (I'll send you an email, tomorrow I suppose, and I've read some about VideoView)