Comment by 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/)
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)