Great to see a novel approach to handle deep discussion trees. Reddit obviously benefits from this approach, HN not so much. HN discussion trees tend to be shallow, in my experience. It is also not clear to me how this UX translate to mobile. Cool demo though. Keep up the good work.
Traverse: Visualization of Complex Nested Discussion Trees
11–12 of 12 posts
Re: Traverse: Visualization of Complex Nested Discussion Trees
#12This is a great format for drilling down! A few recommendations:
* Hovering out instantly resets, which causes you to lose your place. How about a (user-configurable?) timed gradual reset so you can get back to where you were if you accidentally hovered out for a second.
* I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around a flat list as nested - this just might be old habits. Maybe a user setting to indent nested children?
* The colors indicating score could be on more of an obvious scale - I'm having trouble instantly identifying whether green is better than purple, etc. To me, a pale color is less exciting than a 'colorful' color, but pale is used to signify most popular here.
* Maybe you can click+drag to pin multiple comments. The singletons have tiny slices and there's often many of them - it would be nice to view them all at a glance.
* Related to previous, maybe a filter for how deep the subtree is, or by score. Sometimes you don't want to see it all, or want to see only the best (or the worst).
I really like (in the radial presentation) that the newest comments are as accessible as the oldest, and that multiple sort options are available at once without the need for a round trip back to the server (the radial presents age, colors in the radial present relative popularity, the side bar presents global popularity).