Hi all,
Welcome to my first turn on the dev diary.
Coming from the community into the community platform team has been a smooth process and all the staff and you wonderful lot in the community have made me feel very welcome. Thanks :heart:
As many of you already know a fair bit about my journey with giffgaff, I thought I would tell you a little more about my journey as a developer starting with a design principle that could arguably be more important to me than any other, and could even be attributed to me getting my first job as a developer nearly 7 years ago, The 3-Click Rule. It is a design principle that is concerned with navigation on websites whereby if it takes more than 3 clicks to get to some place or information, it is taking too long.
The first time I ever heard of this rule was in relation to the very first iPod before I even knew what the internet was, and I am not sure if this is true or just one of those whispers that never got confirmed, but apparently Steve Jobs - who was famously notorious for the way he gave criticism - looked for a song but gave it back before he even knew if it was on there because in the 3 clicks he made he didn’t get to where he wanted to be. He claimed that it was too complicated and that it needed to be more intuitive, which included being able to get to any song, album, or artist, in three clicks or less.
While sometimes it is just not possible to achieve this 100% I feel that on the community, we seem to have done a smashing job, with only a couple of parts that take more than 3 clicks, but in understandable ways, like having to open the sidebar on mobile adds a ‘click’ but on the whole the important parts fall in line with the 3-Click Rule:
You want to see new posts with a specific tag? Click the tag from anywhere.
You need to check on replies? Click the bell icon and then select the notification.
You wanna see a post you made? Click your avatar, then profile and the posts are there.
This week has been very hands on as we have had to tackle a couple of unexpected service issues which lead to some top notch improvements to the back end, such as introducing asynchronous Redis queues which, allow us to offload slow processes (such as notifications) into a separate execution stream. This really reduces latency and improves loading times - have you noticed how quickly you can create a new thread now? It’s marvelous.
I have been focused on the photography tag which is out in preview. Thank you all for all the feedback so far, I am looking forward to hearing more and hope that you all like it when it’s completed.
UX/UI Improvements
@harrycollins97 has been working on some UI enhancements to Community following on from last week’s work with @annesolano . Several areas have been improved, such as:
- Design for the ‘Best Answer’ choice button within each discussion - updated design and dynamic style changes. Button stylings now change upon click for emphasis of available choices.
- From now on, all new Best Answers chosen will display the time/date at which they were set - we hope this can add some more context to a discussion’s best answer for those looking for it
- Updates to discussion lists layout - excerpts have been renovated and the discussion author/most recent replier have been put same line (on desktop) as per member request.
As well as this, extra bits-and-bobs have been tidied up around Community. These changes are now live on preview and will be up on the main Community soon.
That’s it for today.
Wishing you all a pleasant weekend!
