Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions/Flow

We're releasing a new Flow feature today on mediawiki -- a Table of Contents, which is designed to help people browse and navigate around a Flow board.

As you scroll down on a Flow board, you'll see a persistent header that gives you access to the Table of Contents, wherever you are on the page. You can scroll around using the Table of Contents, and hop quickly from one topic to another.

The current feature is version 1 -- there are a few more tweaks that we want to make, so there will be a v2 coming. This is also a milestone on the road to Search -- we're going to build the feature to search on a Flow board on top of the ToC feature.

It's going live here a little later today. I'm looking forward to hearing what you all think of it!

It's pretty subtle. It took me a moment to realize that it was actually there. I was expecting to see (without needing to click on anything) an actual list, and therefore something that displayed more than one line of text (by default).

Yeah, I'm in agreement here that it would have taken me some time to notice it without the announcement. I understand the choice that the list should be clicked on because the TOC loads all topics, and it wouldn't be feasible to display them all at once and push down the rest of the page.

Hey here's an idea. I remember when I opened up the TOC, it covered up the comments on the page. Not a big deal, perhaps, but is there any chance the TOC might be put over in that white space over on the right side there? One benefit to doing this is that opening the TOC would cover up less or none of the comments on the left side of the frame. It might also help it pop-out a little more.

Yeah, we started with the idea that the ToC would be on the right. The idea that won me over to this version is the header changing as you scroll through, to reflect the thread that you're currently on. But if people don't see it, then that's definitely a problem we'll need to solve.

We're doing some user testing late next week on the ToC and a prototype for Search, and one of the basic things we're testing for the ToC is if people actually notice it and use it. :) The tests will be with people who are familiar with wiki talk pages (either reading or contributing to them), so they won't be brand-new newbies. If we see people completely missing the ToC, then we will definitely take steps.

The problem I see with the new ToC design is that it doesn't even look clickable at all.

If people doesn't see it, a first step to test before recovering the "floating ToC on the right" may be to show it expanded by default when the page is scrolled to the top, showing a preview of the first (last) 6-8 topics and a "browse all" link that unfolds the whole pop-up. Scrolling down would fold the box to its current one-line-tall, current-title behavior.

Painting it blue (the color of links) instead of the current grey may also help.

Hey DannyH (WMF). I did a little playing around with it over the last 10 minutes or so. I like how I can CTRL-F through the topics once I've opened it up if I know the topic name and don't want to scroll down through all of it. I also like that even if I haven't loaded the entire page, it will still bring me to a topic that's been well-buried at the bottom of list. I did notice that it takes slightly longer (due to the loading) in this case, but I think that's OK.

I did notice something a little strange-- when scrolling through the list with my mouse wheel (Mouse button 3, it sometimes called), I did notice that sometimes it will scroll the through topic list, but sometimes it would switch to scrolling on the background window. Not sure if this is an artifact of monobook or not (which I am using). I'm going to check real fast with vector.

Hm. Well, I can reproduce the same scrolling issue in vector, but it's kind of hard to describe in words. There seems be some interval of loading time for the topic list after it is visible where the cursor is confused about what part of the screen it is focused on. If you move your mouse around a bit over the topic list, however, the problem appears to fix itself and scrolling is squarely on the topic list rather than the talk page.

Yes, I can repro that scrolling issue in chrome as well.

Oh, thanks for the report. I know that there's been a scrolling issue when it reaches the bottom of the list and there's nowhere else to scroll to -- but it sounds like you're having a different problem. It's happening for you before you hit the end of the list?

Correct, I can produce the error immediately after I opened it up.

Yeah, I can see it in Chrome. It's not happening in Firefox.

I filed a Phabricator ticket for it -- we'll take care of it. Thanks!

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87041

Great to see this live.

Small thing: I find the alignment between the sort order ("Newest topics") and the TOC confusing. It makes it look like I can sort the TOC.

Yeah, I agree it's a little confusing. That's something we'll change when we build the Search feature -- Search and ToC will work together as part of the same bar, and the sort order will be in a more obviously separate place.

Congratulations for the good work. I've been advocating for a table of contents in Flow and following its design iterations from afar, and the results are fairly reasonable. It's a simple and non-intrusive feature that gets the work done, which is something quite difficult to achieve.

I've found a case of a behavior that is not intuitive. After jumping to a topic way down in the middle of the board, scrolling down does the right thing and shows the next topic; but scrolling up triggers a loading animation (so far so good), and when it ends, it jumps to the first topic in the batch of new topics. This is quite surprising, as the expected behavior is to show the end of topic right above the one where I jumped first.

For example, if I jump to "WIBNI infinite scrolling" and scroll up, I'd expect to see the end of "Have bugs been fixed?" which is the immediately previous one, and instead the screen flickers and the scroll bar jumps to the totally unrelated "Topic appears two times".

Yes, that's one of the pieces we want to improve for v2. The board loads topics in batches of ten, but we wanted people to be able to jump quickly to the topic that you choose in the table of contents. So we load the topic that you jumped to, but if you scroll up from there, then we have to load another batch.

In that situation, it should leave you at the bottom of the newly-loaded topics, so that it feels like you're still in the same place on the board. The current version pops you up to the top of the new set, which feels disjointed, like you said. We'll be working on this over the next few weeks.

I'm glad you mentioned it -- it was one of those pieces that made us say, "When we work on this, is anyone going to notice or care?" It's good to know that you did, thanks. :)