Links In Action (Puns!)

Nov 08, 2012
2 Comments

For this week, I decided not to focus on figuring out how users will select the item they want to share a link to without having to scroll through a list of every item on the site. Towards the end of the week, I did take some time to look at the autocomplete gem we use, and I'll be messing with that next week. In order to have a workable subgroup of items for a user to choose from, I've been using the user's bookmarks. Now a user can select any bookmarked world or challenge and share the link to it. Having talked to Jordana about it some, we both think it makes sense for a user's bookmarks to be easily accessible when looking for the recipient of a link anyway. Once following comes back, followees will also need to have priority over other users in the list. I ran into a problem with users having bookmarked worlds or challenges that had thereafter been hidden; this broke the link sharing lightbox, but that's fixed now.

I had written the link section of most of the action methods, but hadn't tested them yet, and we all know that code never actually works right away. After some tinkering, I got sharing a link to produce the appropriate blue-action-box-thingies for the appropriate recipients. I then had fun playing with the different combinations to make sure that the messages worked for different types of items and recipients.

In the sketches I made a few weeks back, I had planned to show an item's shares on its sidebar, much the way remixed worlds are shown. Since links are shared via lightbox, though, I'm wondering whether I shouldn't also display the list of existent shares for an item in a lightbox, the way tags are done. Space-wise, I think it would need to be different than tags, in that the "add a tag" option and the "see the 4 tags this world has" link produce the same lightbox. For links, the selection list takes up a good chunk of space and the display of existent links will be similar looking, so I feel like if I go the lightbox route, there'll need to be two different looks. The sidebar would be more visible and less potentially confusing for users (leads to there only being one kind of link lightbox), but there are already sidebars on all the pages, and adding another type of content could make the pages too long, or squeeze out other important content (like news or remixes).

Comments

kyle said:

<p>You know... now that we don't have a "Scrapbook" anymore... "bookmarks" may not make sense. So while you are exploring designs for the linking it may be nice to know if you have any thoughts that come up in the process for bookmarks.</p>

Posted on Nov 09, 2012
caitlin said:

<p>The selection portion of this is a tricky problem, I'll be interested to see what designs you can propose to make it feel natural.</p>

Posted on Nov 09, 2012

Links in Action (PUNS!)

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Mary Chou