Suggestions for a Better Threaded View
The current threaded view layout has two significant usablity problems:
1. Finding new-to-you posts within a discussion is difficult.
2. Replies get progressively narrower the more deeply they are threaded, to the point that only a few words may be visible per line.
This discussion is intended for (practical!) suggestions to help eliminate those problems. I would appreciate it if you would confine your replies to constructive comments about that topic.
Personally, I would like to see the threaded view layout rearranged so that the right sidebar items were placed horizontally across the top of the page, perhaps as drop downs similar to the behavior of the "New," "Your Stuff," etc. items. This would free up the space they currently use for wider reply bubbles, easing problem #2 above. I think this is highly doable, involving only a template redesign.
For problem #1, some highly visible marker indicating which posts are new-to-you would be useful. I'm not so sure this is as easily doable, but for example new posts could have a different bubble background color, maybe a pale yellow, or a bold text marker in the "date/in response to" line of each reply, maybe something like "••NEW••"
A text marker would also have the advantage of being something a browser's find function could search for.
Thoughts? Comments?
