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Show HN: A UI That Lets Readers Control How Much Information They See

kayce.basqu.es

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Re: Show HN: A UI That Lets Readers Control How Much Information They See

#31

Post by kaycebasques »

gumby wrote: post #5

Seems like documentation has already been able to handle this for centuries, via table of contents, overviews, introductions, detail sections etc, and readers have handled that fine. Instead of adding work to the authors, simply use the semantic markup...or even let the reader do so.

Definitely. In another section which I eventually scrapped (I'm the author) I argued that for most situations I think there are more straightforward ways to segment content for different audiences.

However, there are some edge cases where one page must serve multiple audiences. Such as a "get started" experience that you have invested a lot of time and money into and which is unfeasible to duplicate. Or news articles. But then again, the inverted pyramid seems like a pretty good solution for news articles...

Re: Show HN: A UI That Lets Readers Control How Much Information They See

#32

Post by kaycebasques »

srikz wrote: post #23

Thanks for making this and for all the great pointers here. I have been taking notes for years to build something like this. I had come across a zooming UI concept from Microsoft which dealt with a similar idea (don't remember the details) back in 2012. I hadn't followed up with this after that. Regarding the significant effort for writers I have been exploring a few options as that felt like the biggest drawback for…

> Thanks for making this and for all the great pointers here.

My pleasure. Thank you for reading.

In the "updates to the prior work" section I have now linked to an HCI thesis that automates the process of flagging important content. That would be one way to reduce the workload for writers.

The other approach is to just simplify the process of marking up content. If you write the markup yourself in markdown or HTML (or whatever), like I do, I think it may always be a bit of a hassle. Maybe a code editor plugin could help here. But if you author in a GUI environment, flagging the priority of content might be a bit less of a hassle.

Re: Show HN: A UI That Lets Readers Control How Much Information They See

#34

Post by kaycebasques »

preommr wrote: post #29

Unintuitive and not very useful tbh. Seems like something that would be good at first glance, but a really bad idea once you dig into it. ----- I would like to see some suggestions on the semantics of different levels of content detail. Because different authors could organize their articles in different ways such that it would be hard to navigate the information since there's no standard for what to expect. Which le…

> I would like to see some suggestions on the semantics of different levels of content detail.

My colleague had the same response. He phrased it like this: "I always end up reading the whole article anyways because I don't trust what the author considers to be high importance and low importance."

> And moving in between levels isn't easy either. It's not just certain sections, individual paragraphs seem to change from level to level.

I'm assuming that you mean Parametric Press's implementation. In my blog post (I'm the author) I instinctively marked up sections as high-priority or low-priority. But I hadn't thought about this until you pointed it out. Inevitably, some authors would markup a section as high-priority, but put low-priority paragraphs within the section. So paragraphs would disappear from the section, as you said.

> I am not even sure that an author would want to put in all this effort and write an article in such a way.

Yes. Speaking from the experience of creating this prototype, it sucked to author this. That's why I said that users would have to positively respond strongly to this feature in order to make it worthwhile. Otherwise writers simply won't have the motivation to do it.

Re: Show HN: A UI That Lets Readers Control How Much Information They See

#35

Post by kaycebasques »

monkeydust wrote: post #33

Where I work there spending a lot of effort in nlp tools to summarise documents of all sorts. I like this idea.

In yet another section that I ultimately scrapped, I suggested that this might be an effective way to automate the process of summarizing documents. The usual approach is to manually create a section that summarizes the document. Which can eventually become out-of-sync with the actual content. This approach would ensure that the summary is always in-sync with the actual content.

Re: Show HN: A UI That Lets Readers Control How Much Information They See

#37

Post by westoncb »

I did a quick side project with my sister on a UI with similar goals. We called the documents, "variable level of detail documents"—demo here http://symbolflux.com/lodessay/

Also: we started a wysywyg editor to make these 'nesting docs' here: http://symbolflux.com/nestingdocs/

Re: Show HN: A UI That Lets Readers Control How Much Information They See

#38

Post by kaycebasques »

blattimwind wrote: post #12
duxup wrote: post #11

I really like this in concept. There's times when I hit a site and I'm just there to do one of maybe three common things, but it's sort of "hidden" in a jumbled site. Granted this is all about data on screen but I would think you could extend it to common actions or such. Maybe you'd also learn that all your users really just use or want a simple view rather than a more complex site?

I've seen a network configuration tool that had a drop down in the application header where you could choose between "Simple", "Advanced" and "Expert"; each presented largely different user interfaces, which were actually quite good. E.g. with "Simple" there simply was a list of Wi-Fi networks and a wizard for creating new ones or changing them with basically three options: SSID, password and whether it's a guest net…

A link to this tool would be much appreciated!

Re: Show HN: A UI That Lets Readers Control How Much Information They See

#39

Post by kaycebasques »

westoncb wrote: post #37

I did a quick side project with my sister on a UI with similar goals. We called the documents, "variable level of detail documents"—demo here http://symbolflux.com/lodessay/ Also: we started a wysywyg editor to make these 'nesting docs' here: http://symbolflux.com/nestingdocs/

Thanks, I'll add to the "prior work" section.

Re: Show HN: A UI That Lets Readers Control How Much Information They See

#40

Post by kaycebasques »

duxup wrote: post #18
blattimwind wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a network configuration tool that had a drop down in the application header where you could choose between "Simple", "Advanced" and "Expert"; each presented largely different user interfaces, which were actually quite good. E.g. with "Simple" there simply was a list of Wi-Fi networks and a wizard for creating new ones or changing them with basically three options: SSID, password and whether it's a guest net…

Yeah I used to be a network engineer and there were a number of tools that to some extent offered an advanced and simple view. They were usually pretty terrible about picking what went where (I suppose that's the real trick) but the idea was always a good one.

> They were usually pretty terrible about picking what went where

Therein lies the rub

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