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When creating topics, put search phrase in the title and put title above body
This is a minor UI nitpick, but it's one of those, "What were you thinking???" ones.
I don't know about other users, but when I go to give feedback on GSFN, the phrase that I type into the initial search box (where GSFN looks for similar topics) is always much more appropriate as the title of a topic I expect to create, than as the body. Which makes it really annoying that when I proceed to the "Start a new topic" page, my search string show up in the "details, please" section, instead of the "give your problem a great title" section.
I end up having to copy/paste the phrase between the two fields every time.
And while we're on the subject, who's brilliant idea was it to create a form where the subject field was below the body field? Are you kidding me! Every email and forum product for the last 30 years has put the subject above the body. Was it really necessary to break a form factor that every user has been familiar with since they were in grade school?
I don't know about other users, but when I go to give feedback on GSFN, the phrase that I type into the initial search box (where GSFN looks for similar topics) is always much more appropriate as the title of a topic I expect to create, than as the body. Which makes it really annoying that when I proceed to the "Start a new topic" page, my search string show up in the "details, please" section, instead of the "give your problem a great title" section.
I end up having to copy/paste the phrase between the two fields every time.
And while we're on the subject, who's brilliant idea was it to create a form where the subject field was below the body field? Are you kidding me! Every email and forum product for the last 30 years has put the subject above the body. Was it really necessary to break a form factor that every user has been familiar with since they were in grade school?
I’m copy/pasting every frackin' time
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I have the same experience as you do, Robert, in terms of my initial phrase being more appropriate for the title. And I'm always cutting and pasting in the way you describe.
The "brilliant idea" of flipping the order of title/body was from Matt Haughey, the creator of Metafilter and AskMetafilter. We had a problem with the first design in that people asked long questions and then left them in as super long titles with no description. It turns out that AskMetafilter had the same problem early in its life, and Matt discovered that by flipping the order he was able to virtually eliminate super long titles. This in turn improved usability and overall responsiveness of the user base. We tried this solution on our site, and experienced the same amazing result.
Our armchair psychologist explanation is that while some bloggers and type A personalities may start with the topic fully formed in their heads, most people need to work out their ideas at length first. Then they're in a better position of summarizing their content.
This may be one of those situations where the very breaking of a norm gets people to think about what they're doing, and consequently produce more thoughtful output.
The company says
this solves the problem
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Inappropriate?I have the same experience as you do, Robert, in terms of my initial phrase being more appropriate for the title. And I'm always cutting and pasting in the way you describe.
The "brilliant idea" of flipping the order of title/body was from Matt Haughey, the creator of Metafilter and AskMetafilter. We had a problem with the first design in that people asked long questions and then left them in as super long titles with no description. It turns out that AskMetafilter had the same problem early in its life, and Matt discovered that by flipping the order he was able to virtually eliminate super long titles. This in turn improved usability and overall responsiveness of the user base. We tried this solution on our site, and experienced the same amazing result.
Our armchair psychologist explanation is that while some bloggers and type A personalities may start with the topic fully formed in their heads, most people need to work out their ideas at length first. Then they're in a better position of summarizing their content.
This may be one of those situations where the very breaking of a norm gets people to think about what they're doing, and consequently produce more thoughtful output.
The company says
this solves the problem
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Inappropriate?I'll comment to say that the change was pretty drastic in the quality of titles. Almost instantly, the 5 sentence long titles just stopped.
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Inappropriate?Ha! Great explanation, I love it. I guess that rational makes sense for the body/title field placement. However, for us users that "get" how the search field relates to the "Start a topic" page, can I suggest you have your servers be a little smarter about which field the search phrase ends up in?
Specifically, if the phrase is a single sentence (and shorter than 80-100 characters?) than put it in the title field. If it's longer than that, put it in the body. -
Inappropriate?I like that idea!
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Inappropriate?I'll talk this over with Lane, see if he has any objections/comments and this should be a very easy thing to develop.
-Scott -
Inappropriate?How am I working with all these smart people? It's constantly impressive that great ideas like this pop up, make total sense, and get placed right into the product.
I’m amazed, in a good way
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Inappropriate?Hooray for Robert! Thank you for bringing this up. I almost always want my search query to show up in the title field on the create a topic page.
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Inappropriate?i have added it to our bug tracking system, and bumped it up in priority so that we can get it done quickly.
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Inappropriate?I just checked in the code for this, it will go out with tonights deploy.
The cutoff line is at 70 characters, which is roughly around the length of the content you can fit into the title box without it extending beyond the visible area.
As an interesting note, our average topic title length is 39.5 characters.
-Scott
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