Discussion: observation about how #s of people are referred to on tag pages

[ebarry]

I'd appreciate a conversation in this issue, hopefully resulting in a few simple, good ideas that could be implemented. But for now this is merely a discussion.

URL
https://publiclab.org/tag/balloon-mapping

Context

1. When i look at the current tags page, i find it confusing that the number of people subscribed are listed in the side right as number of people "discussing." This is far away from the "Subscribe" button on the left side, and my confusion is compounded because I do not directly associate the words "subscribe" and "discuss", which makes it unclear what the number of people discussing is referring to. Does anyone else feel this way? I have drawn an arrow proposing to move the number of "people discussing" into the box with the Subscribe button.

2. The number of contributors is hidden in the drop-down menu "By Type". I have a feeling like the people on this site could be featured in a different way from the documentation that they create. I am wondering if there's a way to move the Contributor link out of the "By Type" menu. It would be nice to see the # of contributors and # of subscribers related in the layout in some way.

3. Seen together, the three blue buttons pose too many calls to action. I feel the subscribe button should be given the most prominence. The lower two blue buttons for asking or answering questions are so long that they fight for visual prominence. Here's one idea: only show the Ask a question on foo or subscribe to answer questions on foo when the content type "Questions" is selected from the dropdown, meaning on this type of page: https://publiclab.org/questions/tag/balloon-mapping

4. This is so minor because there are so few admins, but could the button and text "Add Tag Parent" (Admin Only) be moved into the right sidebar underneath "Related Tags"?

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

[jywarren]

Hi Liz, thanks for posting. Quick thoughts:

for 3, they are already removed in https://stable.publiclab.org/tag/balloon-mapping, so no worries. Likewise for 4, all extra stuff is being moved under the ... menu in the tag card upper right corner, and that'll include the tag parent button.

For 1 and 2, this goes back to the DIAL UI project designs and the Style Guide, and also gets at the shift towards "forums" as a mental model. Subscribing is how you become part of the forum, so the "forum members" and "joining the forum" became our top priorities. The discussion we had at the time was to address the discrepancy by doing our utmost to convert contributors into subscriber/members -- a project we've recently revived so I hope that'll address a lot of the ambiguity here.

Another thing is we have this PR open that needs wrap-up, that displays /both/ "follower/subscriber/members" and contributors on the same page: #5632 -- both "Contributors" and "X people discussing" link there.

Two thoughts to carry this forward, apart from that tag-subscribers-outreach project:

1. The nomenclature of a "forum member" is a little unclear. We'd talked about the word "discussing" as emphasizing discourse. Is there a brainstorm we could do to develop a better one? follower, subscriber, member...
2. Some contributors won't want to become follower/subscriber/members, no matter what, and that's reasonable. Is "contributor" a good word for them, and how might they be listed without causing confusion WRT the follower/subscriber/member role? Could they be termed "former followers" or something? That's not quite right. Or could we show follower/subscriber/members, and below that, have text like: X people have contributed to this topic but are not follower/subscriber/members ?

Definitely open to ideas here. Contributors plays an attribution/credit role in addition to a "part of a group" role, so there is definitely a reason to continue tracking it. But to me it seems secondary to the list of people actively engaged in the topic -- i.e. "who will hear you if you post there". Love to hear other thoughts on this though. Thanks for posting!

[ebarry]

ok this is great information, thanks for updating me.

I read in your comment that both "Contributors" and "X people discussing" will link to the same page, perhaps https://publiclab.org/contributors/balloon-mapping ? That is great. So we will be figuring out how to display these two types of counts of people (contributors and followers/discussants) on the main /tag page, and on the /contributors/tag page.

For me, I want to maintain our highlighting of contributors by displaying a total count of contributors and offering some kind of display with link to their profiles (currently a list, but it could look more like Community Toolbox, eventually, if that's of interest?), in addition to listing the number of "followers, subscribers, members" by tag.

[jywarren]

The issue I linked to by Isha is work towards showing two tables side by side, one for subscribers and one for contributors. But what I'm wondering is, could we show subscribers as the "main" display, but below it, list essentially "contributors who aren't subscribed" -- that would also reduce the # of ppl shown twice? It may also help facilitators to see who to encourage to subscribe.

…

On Mon, Sep 9, 2019 at 10:12 AM Liz Barry ***@***.***> wrote: ok this is great information, thanks for updating me. I read in your comment that both "Contributors" and "X people discussing" will link to the same page, perhaps https://publiclab.org/contributors/balloon-mapping ? That is great. So we will be figuring out how to display these two types of counts of people (contributors and followers/discussants) on the main /tag page, and on the /contributors/tag page. For me, I want to maintain our highlighting of contributors by displaying a total count of contributors *and* offering some kind of display with link to their profiles (currently a list, but it could look more like Community Toolbox, eventually, if that's of interest?), in addition to listing the number of "followers, subscribers, members" by tag. — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#6247?email_source=notifications&email_token=AAAF6J3BHSREB7NIQKVDDETQIZKSXA5CNFSM4IUAWP6KYY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOD6HXAYA#issuecomment-529494112>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAF6J6KUXS3SWRR7BIPQILQIZKSXANCNFSM4IUAWP6A> .

[ebarry]

Here's an idea -- display these terms and numbers for the different ways that people are engaged in a regular sentence so that the terms have context, for example:

"This Topic has X contributors, and X people following along"

This sentence could appear in the card, and the "Subscribe" button could appear directly after the sentence.

[jywarren]

We've tried to keep the cards to an absolute minimum of text/info, so as to make them very readable. That's not to say we can't fit this, but it's a classic "limited real estate" problem, so I want to be careful.

Would a more compact 12 contributing | 8 following work? It could include a (?) icon linking to to an explanation of what that means. Alternatively 12 contributors | 8 followers (?)

Or do you think it's worth including the full sentence on every card? I'm especially thinking of the limited space on mobile devices but any way we can keep the cards minimal helps the overall design stay focused and non-overwhelming. What do you think?

For reference, here's the intended design on a mobile device:

[ebarry]

i prefer the verbs of contributing, following, etc, but it seems like other experiences around the web, especially social media (twitter, instagram) are making us expect "identities" like contributors and followers.

If there's no room for a sentence, there's just no room. It's OK. However, then we are still left with the problem we've made for ourselves, which is that upon first read, there's no inherent meaning of what a contributor is or what a follower is, and how the big blue "Subscribe" button relates to being either of those words. I think we need to give some context. A sentence gives context, but perhaps it can be done another, shorter way?

Related to context, elsewhere around the web (aka social media accounts or forums) it's also common to see a number indicating volume of content generated in a forum thread (which is what tags are for us now) or by a social media account. On an instagram account you see how many posts an account has made, or on a twitter account you see "how many tweets and how many likes" an account has. In our case this would be a total # of posts, comments, wiki pages that that tag is applied to. I think this is important for adding a sense of scale, as in -- how big is this topic?.

[jywarren]

Ah, note that in the updated mockup SUBSCRIBE was changed to FOLLOW. Also, noting that the topics page tag card design (that'll also be on the new dashboard and profile page) has a link for "124 people discussing" so this could also follow a concise pattern we establish here. I think if you don't feel the (?) help link is enough, we could have a popup or other help text that displays only for new users, explaining it a bit. Would you like to explore that idea a bit more?

…

On Mon, Sep 9, 2019 at 3:45 PM Liz Barry ***@***.***> wrote: i prefer the verbs of contributing, following, etc, but it seems like other experiences around the web, especially social media (twitter, instagram) are making us expect "identities" like contributors and followers. If there's no room for a sentence, there's just no room. It's OK. However, then we are still left with the problem we've made for ourselves, which is that upon first read, there's no inherent meaning of what a contributor is or what a follower is, and how the big blue "Subscribe" button relates to being either of those words. I think we need to give some context. A sentence gives context, but perhaps Related to context, elsewhere around the web (aka social media accounts or forums) it's also common to see a number indicating volume of content generated in a forum thread (which is what tags are for us now) or by a social media account. On an instagram account you see how many posts an account has made, or on a twitter account you see "how many tweets and how many likes" an account has. In our case this would be a total # of posts, comments, wiki pages that that tag is applied to. I think this is important for adding a sense of scale, as in -- *how big is this topic?*. — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#6247?email_source=notifications&email_token=AAAF6J3TCWO2NIT2H2IGMXDQI2RTDA5CNFSM4IUAWP6KYY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOD6IZU2A#issuecomment-529635944>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAF6J5DXWNMTK5UOBYER53QI2RTDANCNFSM4IUAWP6A> .

[ebarry]

ok let's try the (?) link.
What about the idea of expressing the amount of activity in the topic on the card on tag pages? This number is already partially in two places: 1) the number of notes shown on hover over a blue tag on a content page; 2) on Topic cards that say "and X number more posts".

[jywarren]

Just summarizing where we are:

1. we'll show X contributors | Y followers (?) in the card, and adopt that vocab across the site

And questions left:

1. now that both contributors and followers are represented on /contributors/____ (by @IshaGupta18 in Add followers list to Contributors pages #5089) we should circle back to how those lists are shown, from the above comment. To avoid overlap, we could show Contributors, then Followers, but if Followers have already appeared in the Contributors list, they might not appear twice (our choice). Maybe Contributors then need an icon to show if they are following. Or should we just have 2 lists, one above the other, with redundancies?
2. The "amount of activity" next to the above would be a bit of a long datapoint, like:

X contributors | Y followers | Z posts (?) -- and then what, would we show questions, wiki edits?

What if we compacted the view options above the posts (By Views / By Likes and the right-side By Type) to make room, and put this triple stat on the left in that space? That's a bit less crowded, but still pretty high visibility.

Could be like (but with icons):

[ebarry]

The mockup for your second point looks great @jywarren ! let's do the # posts by # contributors | # followers

For your first question, i like you suggestion that "Contributors then need an icon to show if they are also following", and then have a separate list for those who are only following.

Thanks!!!!! 💃

[jywarren]

Broke up the take-aways from this and opened:

• Reorganize /contributors/___ pages #6304
• Add # posts by # contributors | # followers to tag pages #6305
• Add counts to by type dropdown on tag pages #6306

Thank you! Closing here and opening a new issue to get into navigation discussion.

[jywarren]

And picking up discussion of navigation on the individual tag page here: #6307