Hi Sorin, On 03/27/2012 01:32 PM, Sorin Burjan wrote:

Hello everybody,

I have started testing and playing a little bit with our new features, the "merge between Annotations and Comments". I am very happy about this new feature, since this offers more flexibility and power.

However, this is the initial commit and it still requires polishing in order to be ultra cool. Here are some of my suggestions after I tried to impersonate a "non technical end-user":

1) After adding an Annotation, user wants to add a reply by hovering over the yellow icon and clicking on the "Reply" button. This will move the caret at the bottom of the page, in the Comments Tab. It is a little bit confusing for the end users, which would expect an input text area to appear in the Annotation box, instead of being moved to the bottom of the page.

2) User wants to see the full thread of an annotation. He/she will hover over the yellow icon, and only the first/initial annotation will be visible. If there is at least one reply to that annotation, the user will see a link with "See thread". Clicking on the link, user will be sent in the Comments tab at the bottom of the page. An idea is to be able to see the whole thread related to that annotation in the same place, without having to be moved to the bottom of the page. Now a problem might be if the thread is really large.

The initial UI proposal for annotations was indeed like that, with replies displayed "inline", under the annotation when hovering. We could do that, but indeed there is a problem with scalability (we could use a "see more" link or something). There is also an implementation issue, as it might not be that easy to do that, but let's say we don't care about that for now. However this and some other issues that you mentioned under are about how you see the comment threads, if they're tightly connected or loosely connected. Tight connection means that there is a very strong relation between the comments in the same thread, that replies are actually comments to the comment and that they cannot exist one without the other, so a thread needs to be handled as a unity. Loose connection means that the relation between the comments in the same thread is a weak relation, is more of a symlink than a hard link if you want, and that replies are actually comments of the document, which are only "related" to the comment they reply to (but their existence doesn't depend on the comment but on the document), and as a consequence they can live one without the others. Unfortunately, depending on the usage of the comments (what they actually contain) and of the user who sees it, the vision can be one or the other.

3) User wants to delete the whole thread (maybe he/she wants to delete the annotation + all the threads). Clicking on the x button, only the first/actual displayed annotation will be deleted, leaving the rest of the thread/replies on the page at the bottom. IMO this would create confusion among end users and leave mess in the page objects, because users will not understand the context of the remaining comments. This behavior actually comes from Comments feature, which is keeping the replies even if the level 1 comment is deleted.

What makes it one way or the other is the type of connection we decide to have. However this is a pure comments issue, not an annotations issues. I would rather go for loosely coupled comments so deleting a comment should not touch the replies. Maybe we can have an option...

4) Clicking on the "See Thread" link, will move the user to the bottom of the page, and will highlight with yellow color the Author and Content of the first annotation only. IMO this is not very suggestive, the highlight could be useful only as a delimitation of the "starting" point of the thread, but by highlighting the content too is confusing for end users. This behavior comes from the Permalink behavior of Comments feature.

I think the highlight is collateral here, what's important is the positioning of the page. In the end, it does take you to the place where you can "see the thread". It doesn't necessarrily means it has to isolate it from context. However this also depends a bit on how we see the concept of thread, as I described above.

5) If we say that Annotations are merged with Comments, we can decide if we still keep them visually separated. When adding a new Annotation, in the Comments tab, you can see a small yellow icon denoting that this is an annotation. If user replies to that annotation, the second/nested annotation will be treated as a regular comment. This means only level 1 annotations are marked with the yellow sign, replies or ordinary comments aren't. This seems a little inconsistent IMO.

As I said above, it depends on how you see the comment threads: does the fact that a comment is a reply to an annotation make the reply automatically an annotation on the same text from the document as the replied annotation? if they're tightly coupled, maybe, if they're loosely coupled, no. I would that a reply to an annotation is not necessarrily an annotation as well. What would be interesting to do is to be able to reply to a comment with an annotation (so that if a reply is an annotation then it's an annotation by itself, if it's not it's not) and although it would be a breeze code/storage wise, I don't see how could we make an ui for that, to allow selecting the annotated text and the comment to reply to at the same time. Regardless of whether we decide they're valid or not, you should still report all this so that we have a track on jira about the fact that we thought about it. Thanks, Anca

This is not a vote, but if we decide on polishing one of these things, I will create the corresponding JIRA issues.

WDYT ?

Regards, Sorin B. _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs