I love the idea of this feature but it totally caught me off guard this morning. There wasn't anything anywhere that told me something had changed... was there meant to be? Did I miss something? I did read the blog but I thought a major interface change like that might have some kind of alert at the top of the page or something similar? Perhaps if autoscroll had worked that wouldn't have been neccesary...?

Totally agree that we shouldn't neglect super users and it was a massive oversight to not put an announcement up when the feature was rolled out. Thanks for raising this @joshuavial and @malcolmshearer

My main gripe with the flipped discussion is that the comment form is now distant from the proposal, so I can't refer to it while I type.

I wonder if the discussion and decision panels should scroll independently of each other?

agreed. a sticky proposal that stays fixed wherever you are in the discussion would be pretty sweet.

I think that would address @joshuavial 's issue of losing track of which tab he's on as well... if the title/context stayed on top while you scrolled through comments.

The simplest fix for now would probably be to change the links that go to discussions.

override show_discussion_path so it is aware of the blue line and all links generated have the #comment-xyz hash like https://www.loomio.org/discussions/7637#comment-54443

That would get around the immediate frustration which I think the majority of users would feel the first time they encounter this feature.

Sticky proposal may be a longer term fix but in the future I would strongly suggest using feature flippers to roll out changes like this to a subset before making live for the whole community.

@joshuavial good idea. Would it be even easier to link to
https://www.loomio.org/discussions/7637#latest, and throw the #latest anchor on the little blue bar? (Does that make sense?)

yeah, simplest would be to put a javascript check on the show page html that adds #latest if it isn't there already - should be a 10 min tweak.

I'm not certain this is the way to go with the current setup. I agree with the point @joshuavial made earlier that one can't see proposals if you're jumped down the page. Disorientating it sounds.

Agree it's not that good @jessedoud but it beats the hell out of a manual scroll to the bottom of the page every time you visit a discussion.

I still think the best course of action is to roll this back and put it through more testing.

It's fine for a team to inflict pain upon themselves while they work on a better design as @richarddbartlett suggests but loomio is a tool that thousands of people use to go about their business and inflicting pain upon them while you 'figure it out' isn't acceptable in my opinion.

thanks for your input @joshuavial , we've heard your message clearly and are integrating it into our decision making.

I'm thinking there are two pains at this point:

• Scrolling down to see new activity is tedious (hot tip: hit cmd+down to jump to the bottom of the page).
• Orientation: when you're down at the bottom of the page (where the latest activity + comment box is), all the orienting information is invisible to you (discussion title, context + proposal).

Making the page automatically scroll to the new activity will resolve the scrolling pain but make the orientation problem worse.

I think the orientation pain can be fixed by having static content on the page, e.g. when you scroll down, the discussion title could stay at the top of the page (the way Discourse does it). Or we could do something like this site, where the article titles have their own sidebar, which provides great orientation and easy navigation between articles.

I'm not sure what to do about the scrolling pain. We're going to have a big design jam tomorrow to try out some ideas. My instinct is that the answer might involve a much reduced initial page length, combined with on-demand loading (aka infinite scrolling).

The more I use this layout though, the more I like it. The blue 'Here's where you read up to last time' indicator solves one of my biggest pains with the discussion page.

I have to say, despite the criticisms so far, using the new scroll on an iphone at lunch and now with an MBP trackpad, even with lack of auto-scrolling, it seems pretty cool. Admittedly I wouldn't call myself a “super-user”, and the discussions I've looked at aren't really long but this interface feels a lot more natural to me. Although, like everyone else, I'd love to be able to refer back to the context easily. If I was on iPhone, I'd be swiping it from the left, have a quick squiz then back to the discussion. Not sure on the laptop, perhaps I could click a button to drop it down, I might get a bit weirded out if it followed me up and down the screen though

I'm not enjoying the new interface at present, but I'll give it some time.

I agree a rollback would only make things worse for users at this stage, look forward to the autoscroll.

I think @lachlanpriest should have a cuppa with @jessedoud and talk about autoscroll.

@joshuavial @lachlanpriest would either of you care to weigh in on my thoughts above about how autoscroll would not help?

Right now I'm thinking the solution is: on initial page load, only 1 or 2 old comments + all the new activity is visible. That would be a quick page load, no scroll, no disorientation solution. I'm imagining a 'click to view the previous 20 comments' button at the top of the discussion, which will load in the old content without reloading the page.

@richarddbartlett it sounds a bit like emails in gmail - right? Sounds good to me!

Interesting. Anna's comment is the only one I can see on this page without clicking "earlier comments". I like the earlier comments feature but would be good to see a couple of previous comments as well...

@richarddbartlett that would be my preferred solution - yammer style comment threads.

@malcolmshearer that's because at the moment the thread uses dumb pagination, meaning it just puts a break in after every 50 events. The design we're thinking would work exactly as you say, showing a couple of previous comments for context + all the new activity.

@joshuavial I think we're going to play with putting some Angular in this discussion thread and making all your dreams come true.

The design being suggested is also what Facebook does with "view more comments" - seems to work well and not lose continuity with the original post.

@lachlanpriest did you know Loomio is open source? Feel free to jump in an implement endless scroll the next time you have 15 minutes :)

No but seriously, if you're keen, help out!

Hey guys, I've added a jump link to the top right hand corner of the discussion. Discuss

Functioning pretty well for me! But display is wonky (I'm using Chrome).

Hrrmmm.. so am I and I don't see that wonkyness..

Ooh! It jumps! Yusss

Is anyone else experiencing the layout bug @alannakrause posted? @alannakrause, are you still seeing this?

Yes I am still seeing it

@jessedoud Got any ideas about this?

The width just needs to be adjusted, but I can't replicate. @alannakrause let me know when is a good time to have a look. Will take less than 5 min.

There have been a number of good design solutions suggested here, but one of the simpler ones seems to have been lost on the flow: provide a button where the user can toggle from 'most recent first' to 'oldest first', like email clients do. You still have to decide which will be the default, but users can decide which order they like best, case-by-case, with the touch of a button.

Sticky proposals sounds good, as does making the discussion title (and maybe Context Box?) static. What about making the comment box static as well? It would save a lot of scrolling back and forth to give quick replies to multiple comments along the thread.

In terms of a process for rolling out potentially disruptive features, would it be possible to offer new features to admins, and let them opt-in? When a feature gets a certain proportion of opt-ins (eg 51% of 75%), and presumably has an major dents hammered out of it, you announce in the app that it will be rolled out as a new default feature, and when. I'm thinking along the lines of keeping the users as participants in the development process, rather than just consumers of a commodity which is changed arbitrarily by invisible decision-makers.

@alannakrause I did! But I had issues with set up as it appears to be a nonstandard implementation of postgres - which causes issues with all of my other projects.

This plus will_paginate is pretty much all you need: https://gist.github.com/lachlanp/6999049

Just so you know, members of the Permaculture Council were quiet thrown by the sudden reversal of the familiar UI, and it's made them a bit concerned about using Loomio. They'll get over it, but it confirms the need to involve users in the roll-out of UI changes.

@strypey thanks for passing that on. Yeah, we've definitely learned a couple lessons here. :)

I still don't like the new order of posts - it involves a lot of scrolling each time I visit a thread to catch up on the one or two newest posts. If you could code it so that the page automatically scrolls to the first new post on the thread, that would help a lot. But to me, on a 'live' presentation, latest activity first (at the top) is more natural.

Thanks @goob, good to hear your feedback. We're about to do a big overhaul of our entire UI (designing mobile-first) starting with the discussion page, with our sole aim being to make everything as easy and natural as possible. I'm feeling pretty confident that the new designs will fix most of the pain people have been experiencing, but we'll be posting up all the designs for feedback and do extensive user-testing along the way to make sure we get it right. So stay tuned. Will probably have a blog post up about it next week.

Also, I agree with @christaklis that different users have different preferences, and really big discussions are going to want to be displayed differently than smaller discussions. So having a UI which is flexible enough to respond to these different sets of needs is going to be really important. And that will probably mean being able to sort comments by a number of different factors (e.g. chronologically, most liked, etc.).

Thanks, Jon.

@jonlemmon as i said in the User preferences and/or group preferences, users and groups must have their own preferences.

And that is because Loomio is growing fast and will grow. With everyday, every week, every month to have new features or have small or big changes.

How is going to be Loomio in 3 months or in 6 months or maybe a year? Perhaps not even close as it started! All that new ideas that are falling every day will make Loomio greater that we imagine.

In how long we don't know, but all users and groups don't have the same requirements or needs. So it is so simple, just users and groups have their own preferences, and that solves all the negatives that maybe someone has for a proposal or proposals, because they don't want it for their groups.

Sometimes what users think they want isn't actually what's best for them :) I know that an unpopular thing to say, but there is a reason not every user is a software designer. Sometimes you have to force change on people before they can understand why it's actually an improvement. On the other hand, sometimes software designers are totally wrong, too!

True @alannakrause but uncofigurable software is only applicable in a very narrow band of functionality. Loomio plans to appeal to broad base and in my opinion it would be madness to try and build something this complex without preferences.

This doesn't mean you expect your users to be software designers but it does mean giving them choice in how they want the tool to function.

btw I'm still frustrated everyday by having to scroll to the bottom of the page to read comments and you might want to think about putting out a quick fix to that problem outside of your big 'overhaul the ui process'

@joshuavial use the little down arrow at the top of the discussion to jump to the unread comments. I'm using it and it's working great.

Does everyone have access to the "Jump to the latest unread activity" button...? Or is that just a select few.

@malcolmshearer everything's for everyone at the moment! With a bit of luck we'll shortly be able to beta test features with particular groups that opt in. That will be nice.

I also want newest posts on the top. It took me few seconds to get used to it and liked it ever since. it was following the natural flow of a discussion: read and respond to latest points raised instead of scrolling through all the things which were said. In fact I am more interested to see what they have decided before in decisions, so I would include that in the main discussion flow. But my main point is that it shouldn’t be required to scroll a lot in order to be active in a discussion.