A feature to help groups move together
I had an idea, prompted by @jonlemmon showing me how the app keeps track of the last time users visit any particular discussion.
My idea is to show where most of the group is up to in reading a discussion, by having say a thin vertical bar next to all the comments that have been seen by most of the group. Most in this context might be 51%, or there may be some more complicated definition.
It's mocked up here for your interest. The mockup shows a tooltip that would appear when users float their mouse over the bar.
Yeah I really like the idea. A single bar along the entire discussion gradating out with transparency as it reaches new unread comments. The more something has been read the more opaque the bar would be at that point. It could be really unobtrusive, but super helpful as you scroll down the conversation to get a feel for participation over time of the whole group. Appolagise if I am just rehashing your concept Rich or Matthew, I sometimes find its hard to grasp the whole visual from a text blurb and the more I go over it, the more details get flushed out. In my head anyway.
Yeah I agree it'd be better to have a bar with variations of opaqueness. That would also happily get around the possibly thorny problem in my original of where to set the cutoff.
I like the thinking on this.... could use some more delving into. I expect people will confuse "what I've seen" and "what the group has seen" easily.
Facebook groups have a "seen by x people" feature under posts....
@alannakrause, I don't think that confusion will result here as if your looking at the discussion. What your've seen is the whole discussion to the present moment. This feature would just communicate how up to date the rest of the group is.
Updated mockup from me:
Nice one Matt. I might suggest the tooltip text could read something like "About x% of group members have seen this far into the discussion", where x would change depending on which segment you were hovering over.
Or instead of %, it could be a fraction "about half of the group" or "three quarters of the group"...
@kellycheesman I'd love to get your thoughts on this if you've time & interest.
Interesting idea. I have to say, as a Loomio user I've never felt the need for this feature. It seems like quite a complex concept to understand and I'm not sure it communicates much more than total discussion views would.
I could see this feature becoming useful later on, potentially as a plug-in, but right now I'm interested in us just getting even the very basic group/discussion engagement statistics into Loomio.
+1 for the opacity idea - 100% for everyone read, 0% for none - hover over for a tool tip saying x% of the group has read this far in the conversation. It's the sort of feature that wouldn't detract from a new person's experience but would be useful for power users
Today's mockup. With some extra design tweaks cos I'm feeling self-indulgent:
Very intriguing. I like it. I would like to play with it in the real world to see if the (admittedly very minor) cognitive tax associated with this feature would be outweighed by its utility.
Maybe even a bar down the full length of the discussion, with a colour gradient from white to green (0 to 100% of users have read this comment).