Ask Echo JS : Why aren't there more Discussions on Echo JS and what are YOU going to do about it?

14 up and 0 down, posted by pablojim 4165 days ago 17 comments

chadams 4165 days ago. link 1 point ▲ ▼

Discussions? it's not entirely clear to me how to utilize discussions. 

I would discuss more if it was easy to get back to articles i'm interested in. A lot of the time they fall off the bottom and I never see them again.

I think being able to "star" articles, and also, seeing a list of all my stared articles would allow me to go back and look over the discussion later. I may not have something to say now, but after looking over a new article, I may want to join in a discussion later.

Developers are busy people and we need to discuss at our own convenience. 

P.S> I would probably would even visit more often having a list of all my stared articles here for later reference, just say'in

Replies

fcambus 4165 days ago. link 3 points ▲ ▼

There is such a functionality built-in actually : when you upvote a story, it gets saved into a (private) list you can access. Check the "saved news" link in your user profile.

So upvoting stories serve two purposes : you help the community by making interesting and quality posts reach the front page, and as a side effect, you keep a track of them :)

fcambus 4165 days ago. link 3 points ▲ ▼

Also, the "replies" link in the menu lists all the comments you posted, along with replies if it received any. In the former case, a little bubble is displayed with the number of unread replies.

rsnickell 4165 days ago. link 2 points ▲ ▼

Dual purposing UI actions leads to confusion in my experience. Even though well intentioned, the idea that voting also saves to a list is an unexpected result.  Even for our savvy group, I would recommend using common user interface hints, like a star or a save for later element.

chadams 4164 days ago. link 1 point ▲ ▼

This replay was helpful, In fact I didn't know about this functionality. I also didn't realize the red arrows were to up/down vote. (this isn't very clear)

Perhaps make a "how to" page or something. 

Also, I didn't notice "saved news", or how to use it with out your reply, perhaps move that to Top menu next to "replies" link or something.

I also agree with rsnickell about the saved list, favorites should be separated. It would be nice to star an article to read later, then if it's not very relevant anymore, remove the star to reduce clutter.


Echo JS is a great resource, I just think it has some easily fixable UX issues.

sbruchmann 4164 days ago. link 1 point ▲ ▼

I like the way, how EchoJS is saving up voted news for reading them later and I also agree, that the UI/UX of voting/saving has to be improved.

Suggestion:
Instead of voting news, let users “star” respectively “unstar” them (like repositories on GitHub) and list starred news on the users profile.

What do you think?

mulderp 4162 days ago. link 2 points ▲ ▼

Hmm.. I like the idea too of improving UX here. I think the voting is not too bad: https://github.com/antirez/lamernews/blob/master/public/js/app.js

What I think might be more helpful is adding 'tags' to a topic, such that you quickly can scan what topics are interesting to you, similar to SO.