AO design criticisms

[maxwellfoley3]

These are some thoughts I had while using AO. @andersaamodt feel free to let me know if you think these criticisms are reasonable, or perhaps if I'm missing something or some larger intentions, and then we can delete this issue and spin off the ones that make sense into more granulated issues.

1. The biggest problem (larger than design) imo seems to be that cards don’t have a clear history and it can’t be seen who created them. This makes it difficult to have a discussion because you can’t figure out who said what. Similarly, it doesn’t seem like there is any way to edit or delete existing cards comments. Not being able to delete anything makes it difficult to interact with the software since one doesn’t want to accidentally do some change that is unintended and visible to everyone else.

2. There is something awkward to the basic task of opening a card from the sidebar. The cursor doesn’t change to a pointer, making it not seem clickable. Then - a double click is required, a single click doesn’t suffice. And then, it takes a short instance before the card appears in the center of the screen, enough where the user wonders if anything happened - some animation would be ideal but perhaps difficult.

3. I can’t figure out how to manage cards in the gifts panel. In one instance, I believe I clicked on a card I got sent and it disappeared and I couldn’t get it back. However now looking at it, I can’t figure out a way to clear the cards away or reduce the number of notifications.

4. It feels like the cards should have some [x] style box to make them disappear. There are two motifs in a similar positions, a red dot and a white line, but in neither case can I determine what they are there for.

5. The + icon in the center far right to open the crypto ticker is misleading. One sees it and imagines that clicking it should create a new card.

6. The “dock” at the bottom of the screen blocks off the bottom portion of the current visible card in the middle, making it not possible to interact with the bottom portion of the card.

7. The number at the bottom of a card (eg “3” here) seems overly vague, it seems like it should read “3 additional hidden cards” or something like that. Some way of visualizing this would be nice too.

[Anders]

These are all great ideas.

1. The reason the creator of a card is not displayed is because the AO is creaed "by hackers, for hackers". Hackers will want a way to create cards anonymously. But it would also be useful to see who created a card. The creator of a card is in fact saved but not displayed anywhere, so this would be an easy feature to add. There could be an option to create a card anoymously, or to remove your name from a card your created.

It is possible to delete cards. Cards cannot be deleted if at least one person is holding the card (by highlighting the moon). A card can be discarded from where it is located by dragging-and-dropping it to the black background. This will not delete the card. Cards with 0 holds will be deleted when the Clear Shitposts button is clicked (like clearing the recycle bin).

There is no way to edit cards yet.

2. Cards can be dragged-and-dropped from the panels, which is why they don't open on single click. I have been thinking of redoing the popups as panels that take up 1/3 or half the screen. They might work better with one-click to open a card (like a menu) in this new design.

3. Gifts can be dragged out of the gifts panel to where you want to keep the card. If you don't want to keep the card, drag it to the black background to discard.

4. The red dot is an unread marker and will disappear when you hover your cursor on the card for two seconds. The tally marks show when others have checked-off the card. If you hover the tally mark it will show you who completed the card.

Cards used to have a button in the lower-left corner, a sinking ship icon, a downboat, that would discard them from the current location. This is the same as dragging and dropping a card onto the black background. We could bring this button back.

5. The + button for crypto tickers should be moved to the main menu (three dots in lower right corner of page). Main menu --> "Add crypto ticker...". That will create space for one more ticker and hide the big distracting + button too.

6. Yes that's a bug. I keep fixing the gap under cards and it keeps returning for various reasons

[maxwellfoley3]

Ok, so it seems like 1 5 and 6 are possible action items, 2 3 and 4 I guess need thinking about to see if they can be made clearer. One thing that could be helpful to make everything more userfriendly is adding helpful text on hover. This would be good for the red dot in particular which is pretty confusing imo.

For the action items, would you rather me add them as issues here, or dogfood using AO (and if the latter, should I put them on dctrl.ca or sots?)

[maxwellfoley3]

Also another issue I found, if the window is not tall enough then these will overlap rudely

[Anders]

Sorry I didn't see this.

Yes, I think the unread feature needs a bit of an upgrade. Maybe it should be a red dot with the word "Unread" and a grey transparent rounded background to show it's a button, and you can click it to make it disappear. Right now the unread marker shows up on every new card, but it should probably only show up on cards that someone else created. It could also show up when cards inside a card have changed, bubbling-up to the top level of a new tab in the gifts inbox.

Your screenshot isn't showing up but hopefully I've improved the layout since March so this doesn't happen!