Feature requests, design proposals and changes in design, typography.
Here is some feature requests and design proposals based on my first 24 hours with askbot (I use it as an intranet StackOverflow).
It is utterly important to see, who and when has accepted an answer—not simply that an answer has been accepted. It gives me information, who do I contact if the stuff written in the answer does not help me. In terms of design, you might either show this information when user hovers on green tick or add a badge like this one http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28274599/Screenshots/69.png which would say "accepted by JohnSmith on 3/4/2013, 6:13 am"
Pagination sucks. This http://askbot.org/en/tags/?sort=used&page=1 is a fine example: it is so not convenient to cycle through 12 pages of tags. Please replace with an infinite ajax scrolling. Or at least let me set "show 2000 items per page" in the admin page. Same goes for main page (/questions): currently max amount in 50 per page, which is not enough and not cool. Please let me set the amount manually instead of giving me a drop-down list of 3 values.
The tags menu on the right side of the main page (/questions) is sort of confusing. See for yourself: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28274599/Screenshots/6a.png Why does it show only tags that are present on the current page? How a first-time user would know this? Why does s/he has to go to "tags" page to see full list? I believe that the full tag list shall be shown here.
The behaviour of search box is a bit weird. It's auto-focused when I load any page. And then, if, say, I press Shift, it starts searching. That's irritating. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28274599/Screenshots/6b.png Can I do something about it?
Look at this page http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28274599/Screenshots/6c.png The "Know someone who can answer?" text block creates so much noise, it is basically yelling at you. At the same time, this text is absolutely unnecessary. It does not deliver any message and I force myself not to notice when I see it for 5th time. So why don't simply remove it? Or at least let me edit it on the admin page? Same goes for "Be the first one to answer this question!" text block. If I'm missing something, please point that out.
I guess that's all for now. I'd like to make askbot even more usable and convenient so I'd like to contribute in terms of providing designs or somehow otherwise.
Thanks.
Comments
Eugene, I agree on many points. Will just explain you why search bar auto-focuses: you should search before asking. On some pages there should not be auto-focus. There are corner cases such as the shift button issue that should be fixed. IMO tags in the side bar of the main page can be just removed. You've listed many issues at once, it would be better to discuss them separately.
@Evgeny Thanks for the prompt response! How and where would you like to continue the discussion?
Here, just try to keep one topic per question. Regarding the contributions it is very important to discuss before working on them (at least if you want them to be merged into our code base). We merge bug fixes, localization contributions without any questions, but it is better to discuss the features first. At this point we want to very carefully choose the new features and focus a lot on improving what we have.