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Please design review these Discussion Template enhancements

Posted by Steve Castledine | December 4, 2009

I previously published some mock ups of possible discussion template enhancements. I have now simplified these and have a build for testing here: Demo Discussion.

Before I start you will note the changes have been simplified to increase the possibility of pushing this back into the product build as soon as possible (as it then has to be tested, automation completed, translated, supported etc). So of course there are bigger things we could have done but have held back on for now to try and get some simple things improved. You will also note the restriction of Domino to display rich text in a view so again there are better ways of doing things if this capability existed so we have done our best to work with this limitation (actually I have some code to display rich text in a view but would not be comfortable putting that in a build template for support and unknown potential performance reasons).

There are also small bugs to be worked out like the hide/show of collapse/expand can get confused, however please, please, please help me test this so when we upgrade the discussion forums on this site we do not have a repeat of the problems users suffered previously (many thanks in advance).

Ok we settled on two areas to tackle - all documents view and viewing the discussion thread. First off:

All documents view:

1) Expand links are gone on the right and replaced by "author" name. This may need reviewing - do you think date should go here instead - what's the most readable?
2) Author name "common" name not hierarchical - on review we may need to reverse this as large organisations prefer this detail in order to determine which "John Smith" has responded - thoughts?
3) Two lined header links down to one (page 1- x looked a bit random positioned previously and was not consistent with rest of app)
4) expand/collapse now has the usual notes domino meaning of collapsing/expanding view - which it does (default is collapsed so user see's more topics) - this is a sticky setting - previously was hiding.showing preview text
5) From 4 above more topics are now visible because responses are collapsed by default
6) Preview text has been removed as 1 click will take you to the full text and the entire discussion thread anyway. It was more important to show more topics on the main thread and increase response speed

Existing template view:

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New (by default) collapsed

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New Expanded
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Discussion Thread:

Previously it was hard to see the entire conversation. If you entered a response you only saw the responses underneath but could not see the main topic or any responses above. We have improved this by always showing the main topic and all responses in a hierarchy. It is also always clear where you entered the conversation by that entry being highlighted in the response list.

In addition when you responded to an entry you only saw the blank response form. Now the form is inserted into the conversation so you see full context and the text you are responding to.

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Comments

 Elijah Lapson commented on Dec 4, 2009 8:14:11 AM

I like the cleanest look which I think is Topic (Title/Subject of Post) and then to the right onthe same top line in smaller font (like you already have) the author and date.

This allow the "body" of the post to start directly below the Title/Subject.

Great work all around! I can not stress the impact of this template on the Lotus Brand in general. Discussion forums were the "bread and butter" of Lotus Notes years ago and I would love to push this template the same way now.

Thanks Again,

Elijah

 Mike Amberg commented on Dec 4, 2009 9:52:34 AM

I was wondering if you could also place the "show entries per page" which is in the footer on the header (in the middle). Once you switch to 100 entries it's a long scroll down to re-set the count

 Mike Amberg commented on Dec 4, 2009 10:00:22 AM

The footer of the discussion page shows a "previous | next" while the header includes the pages numbers. I would suggest the the "previous | next with pages #'s" be used in the footer as well. Might as well put the "collapse all | expand all" there as well. So we would see the "Collapse All | Expand All" on the left, The "Entries per page" in the middle and the "previous | next with page #'s" on the right.

 Johan Källman commented on Dec 7, 2009 4:11:12 AM

This is getting better and better. I have 3 observations:
1: Is it possible to get the font size of the topic as big as the font size of responses. Now the font of the topic is smaller, which seems a bit strange.
2: Is it possible to have an "Expand Topic" icon to the left, expanding the thread headers for just one topic at a time?
3: Is it possible to return to the same page you entered from, when closing a topic? Now it always returns to page 1 when using the "Back to All Documents" link, or "Back" button in IE. This alsoe goes for Expand All/Collapse All

 David Clover commented on Dec 7, 2009 10:19:42 AM

I'd really like to have a URL 'Links' tool to put up hotspots on a discussion note - there isn't one at the moment and it's a pretty basic need as we've found. In fact ability to work in HTML might be useful too - but at least a links hotspot tool would be useful anyway.

David Clover

 Steve Castledine commented on Dec 8, 2009 4:22:03 AM

Thanks for the comments - I will post some updates and also look into the other queries

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