Anyone feeling overwhelmed by activity in the new layout?

Put this out there as we think this might be an obstacle to engagement.

Here are two mock ups for posible new solutions:
1. Turn all badges blue
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-2_0ngxarwAMF9YYlNEcHRpMjg

1. Just have a large blue number for total activity, this would have the popover to get the activity summaries. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-2_0ngxarwASTc3RHJaY2dhZTQ

I think it's fine as is in terms of colors and numbers. What I really want is a "mark as read" function where I can clear discussions on the dashboard without having to actually go look at them, and I want discussions with red things to float to the top automatically. That would solve the issue for me, because i could clear everything, then when I looked back next time I would clearly see what was actually new, and could either look at it our clear it.

Alanna, that is how we have been moving. The pop over would show you the activity and then clear the badges.

Unread moving to the top could prove interesting. Something to discuss.

I'm actually finding it really easy to keep up with everything now, I can't really pinpoint what it was specifically that made the difference though.

Sweet this is all good feedback. Might just be that jon had no internet for three days while he was moving flat.

Would be really helpful to have Next and Previous buttons to navigate through the list of discussions easily without having to open new tabs or go back and forth. I know Jon said this is a bit tricky to implement, but would be oh so convenient!

@aaron — the 'turn all badges blue' mockup looks great to me; very peaceful

The blue badges in the mockup look good as a first step! The big box with number I think might be a bit confusing. If you kept the small box top right it might be good.

I think what might be even better is just a blue circle to indicate new activity, with a pop-over to show what the activity actually was. If there's a pop-over to see what's actually happened in the group then the number really isn't important.

Personally I think this isn't a massively urgent thing - it's really good to keep in mind that nearly every user we have is only in one group, and that nearly every group has a low volume of traffic. I agree that it'll become more urgent as activity picks up, but all the feedback we're getting is that the problem is not enough notification (email notification specifically) - we haven't had any feedback from people feeling overwhelmed.

People being overwhelmed by activity is actually a good problem for us to have, since it shows groups are super active. At the moment the problem we're facing is engaging groups enough to actually get them to that point.

I really like the mockup changing the icons in the current layout to blue.

Hovers for activity summary could be helpful, but I'm not sure if I'd actually use it.

One thing that might be contributing to this (and through no fault of the UI) is the flow of navigating to a Loomio and then navigating back to the discussions view via the browser back button - no elements are reloaded to show that the discussion that was previously blue has now been read.

As an example, in Gmail, if you view an email and then navigate back (via browser) to the inbox, the email you just viewed is newly marked as read.

I've never tried this and I'm not sure what other pros/cons exist for this approach but controlling the back button and forcing the discussions panel to update seems like it could be really helpful for the flow of navigating through unread discussions.

I reckon you'd use it if it meant you could clear notifications with one click without having to go inside the discussion!

@James all you have to do is override the click with javascript to mark it as read BEFORE running navigating to the page, then when you hit back it is still marked as read (as that happened first) without having to mess with browser forward/backs.

Also: really good point

Ah - didn't think of that before! I must have been looking up something far more complex on stackoverflow.

James that sounds like an easy UX win to me.

Aaron the blue is surprisingly nice, though I wonder how readable white on blue is for less-than-perfect eyes?

I don't feel at all overwhelmed by activity and I am a participant in a bunch of busy groups. User interviews please :)

@Richard - sweet, I can make up a trello card and give that task to the team this week.

@Paul - We had a look at doing this in javascript, i.e removing the class - "unread" from the html element, unfortunately due to the page being cached on load with certain browsers / os (as this problem is not happening on linux-chrome and is on mac-chrome) Does anyone have some good ideas for this? We have some ajaxy ideas that involve reloading the whole page and adding it to the stack for back button alternatively possibly an ajax function to reload just that element although this is more involved.

I am finding the page too busy and not adding significant value. I am reluctant to have a view of what I would like though because this is classic user interface stuff. Let's put it through a ui process and not guess.

@Jesse ahhh didn't know about the mac-chrome caching.

The ajaxy solution is probably the best one anyway but I'd do it per element/feature rather than the whole page as ideally all dynamic content should be reloadable on the fly.

That way it would also make it possible to reload portions of the dashboard (and notifications?) every x amount of time to check if anything has changed without reloading the whole page. We could add a little reload button that hooks into the same function too.