Delta Tango Bravo

We just rolled out a new comments system today at Digg. Redesigning one of the busiest and most vibrant comments areas on the web is pretty intimidating. Every day quite a few thousands of people participate in the comments and many more read the comments even if they're not participating. Despite its shortcomings, many people are familiar with the current system and forcing people to adapt to an altered version isn't something I took lightly.

For everyone who is wondering right now "What was their thought process behind the new comments?" or "What were they THINKING!!???", I thought I'd try to explain some of the process behind the user interface changes. If you're curious about the technical aspects of the design, check out the blog of the lead developer on this project, Joe Stump.

Why Change Now?

The Digg comments system was showing its weaknesses as the site has grown... and it's growing quickly! We could see a bunch of technical problems with the comments as they bent under the weight of our growth and we were also aware of features we thought could enhance the commenting experience for all users.

Our users have also indicated that it's time for change — both explicitly by writing to us and implicitly by creating patterns in the current comment system that mimic functionality they wished the comments supported. For instance, advanced commenters have been using the @username shorthand to create faux threading beyond the two-level threading that was available.

Identifying Goals

When we sat down to give the comments a serious rethink, we identified the following shortcomings as our main objectives:

1. Two-level nesting didn't allow for genuine conversations. Particularly experienced commenters were frustrated by the simplistic 'threading' (I'm using 'threading' loosely here).
2. Two-level nesting confused novice users. People who find two-levels too simplistic might find it hard to believe, but novice users were confused about the meaning of 'indented' comments. Novices aren't necessarily vocal and many novices are readers and not commenters themselves, so their frustrations may not be as loud as some. Nonetheless, they're a large audience and their needs are important.
3. Lots of comments broke the page. If there was a comment thread with a couple of hundred comments or more, the sheer size of the html download and rendering simply froze your browser for a few seconds or longer as it loaded the page. Yeah, that's a problem. Totally lame and unacceptable.
4. Replying to a comment happened out of context. The reply system was very basic and forced you to the bottom of the page to enter a comment instead of keeping you in context with the comment to which you were responding. This lead to many mistakes where people responded to a different comment than was intended.
5. Displaying threaded comments facilitates off-topic "top-posting" in early threads. Because you could insert a comment higher on the page by replying to one of the first few comments, people annoyingly posted off-topic replies in the most visible portion of the comments. It was annoying for all users and especially confusing for novices.

More Sophisticated Threading

Comment threading offered two opposing problems: moderate to advance commenters wanted more threading and novice users were confused by the existing relatively simple threading. How to make something more complex and simpler at the same time?

Adding more than two levels of threading was actually pretty simple technically. Our old comment system could have supported multiple levels of comments fairly easily, at least from a technical perspective. However, creating a user interface that made comment threads readable and understandable to a broad array of visitors required a significant rethinking of the comments system. We were certainly concerned that multiple levels of indenting would confuse people and displaying more intricate conversations would put a lot of content in front of people that they likely wouldn't be interested in wading through.

So, we decided to have it both ways. By default, the comment threads are all closed by default. This is nice and simple for novices and people who just aren't interested in delving into detailed conversations. And, now we can enable deeper threading to several levels. When you choose to open a new thread (a conscious choice) it's also easier to understand how the conversation is structured as you're choosing pathways intentionally, no matter what you consider your skill level with discussion forums.

This direction also facilitated a number of other improvements to the comment system, which are discussed next.

Making Lighter Pages to Improve Load Times of Large Threads

There were several options available to us to reduce the load size of the comments pages. The obvious solution was to paginate the comments. However, I've always found paginated comments (see mozillazine for an example) to be cumbersome. It's hard to follow the flow of the conversation and it's annoying to navigate between pages to read everything.

We opted for a more sophisticated approach that I think is actually simpler from a UI perspective. On initial load, we only send the first level of comments and we only load around the first 50 of those. Each time someone selects to see the children of that comment, we call the children using AJAX and insert them without reloading the page. We're also preloading threads in the background to make it even faster to open new threads after the initial load.

Ah, finally, no ridiculous waiting for the page to load on the best discussions on Digg!

Replying in Context

Ok, deep breath, this one is simple to explain. Replying out of context at the bottom of the page sucked. We now load the form with javascript and/or stick it at the end of a thread right where you'd expect it.

Downplaying "Top Posting"

One of the unfortunate consequences of showing the comment threads opened by default (as in the old comments system) was that the first post would get hijacked by people posting off-topic comments. Because comments in response to the first thread were visually higher on the page, they received greater prominence and hence the incentive to respond out of turn. The trouble with this was evident in the way people buried top posters and in the way people apologized when they knew they were responding in a socially unacceptable way. With the new closed-by-default system, hopefully this issue with be mitigated as the incentive is lessened. We'll see how well it works in the wild, but that's the idea.

Conclusion

I'm really excited to see how the new comments system is used in the wild. There will certainly be unexpected consequences and we'll try to adapt as we can. There are certainly certain drawbacks to the new system that will rankle some commenters (eg: not being able to read every comment without clicking) but I'm pretty confident that the trade-offs we made were the right ones. The comments are now lighter, faster, more powerful, simpler, and more flexible.

I've always loved Rapha's swelligent wordmark. I was just going back to their site today to get a little inspiration for a little side project I'm working on and maybe to tempt myself to actually order something. Then I came across this absolutely gorgeous jersey Rapha has created with Paul Smith to celebrate Le Grand Départ of the Tour de France in London. The typography and the details are really quite stunning. It's the map across the back of the shoulders that's the clincher. Heck, it's only three hundred bucks too... practically a steal.

I can't get Peter Bjorn & John's song "Young Folks" out of my head lately. Haven't heard it yet? Check out the video. Though, you probably have heard Young Folks — it was even playing at my laundromat last night and that's when you know a song's following you around. It's almost as pop catchy as Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head", which I hummed for pretty much the entirety of 2002.

Overheard on Twitter two seconds ago: "Email sigs about 'Confidentiality' strike me as approximately as legally enforceable as calling 'shotgun'." Merlin, you're a genius. Which all brings into question, is it kosher to quote someone's twitters? It's not quite email and it's not quite instant messaging, but it's not quite weblogging either. I'd say fair game, it's all public for the finding anyhow, but I'm not sure everyone would agree.

Heck, now that I've actually started writing again, why not go crazy and write a review for our Stuff site too? Over the weekend (yeah, what else would you do over Easter?) I wrote a review of my newish Logitech VX Revolution mouse. After finally disposing of my craptastic Microsoft Bluetooth (sic) Wireless Laser Mouse 8000, I've been really pleased with the Logitech VX. If you're looking for a companion for your laptop, you'll likely be very pleased with it. Two posts in three days... let's hope this productivity lasts.

What better way to break the silence around here than to point out that there exists a Firefox extension called Bork Bork Bork that will read a website to you using the Swedish Chef's voice. It's stuff like this that reaffirms that the interweb is a weird and truly wonderful place.

I happened to run across said extension while trying to find one that will show missing images at the correct HTML-specified dimensions. Basically, if an image is missing from a page, by default Firefox only shows you the ALT text. So, if you specified a 300 pixel by 200 pixel image, when that image doesn't load you get a compact little piece of text instead of a big rectangle. Safari and Internet Explorer display an empty but correctly sized object in lieu of the missing image. Anyone know of a way to make Firefox do it? Is there a greasemonkey script or an extension for it?

Today, Salon sports writer King Kaufman noted that he has been writing for Salon for ten years. King is one of the few jornalists I've ever followed consistently over a period of time and I'm not even a big sports fan. Soccer knowledge aside, he usually has a well-considered and entertaining opinion on whatever is in the news in the world of sports. Anyhow, that's a hamfisted way of expressing my appreciation for his column, which is a daily read for me and one of the main reasons I subscribe to Salon each year.

Kofi Annan lays it down on John Bolton. From a New York Times article today:

Mr. Annan paid his last visit to Washington as secretary general last Tuesday when President Bush gave a dinner in his honor at the White House. One of the guests was John R. Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations who had frequently disdained the secretary general and who had announced the day before that he was resigning.

Asked the next morning at the United Nations whether he and Mr. Annan had made peace at the farewell event, Mr. Bolton said, “Nobody sang ‘Kumbaya,’ ” referring to a confessional song celebrating companionship.

Told of Mr. Bolton’s comment, Mr. Annan said, “But does he know how to sing it?”

Thanks to my bro for the tip. Also, the New York Times just added support for submitting stories directly to Digg.com today. Pretty cool.

This might be old news for Torontonians (or even Canadian residents in general) but I just discovered the plans for new subway trains in the city. The trains, which are to be built by Bombardier are pretty cool looking. What's more interesting is the well-written explanation of the trains' design on the TTC website.

The TTC site comes up with some frequency in Toronto design circles as a quintessential example of poor site design. However, this individual article is concise, well formatted, effective in its use of imagery, and is generally an interesting read. When considering issues of accessibility on the web, it's always interesting to see how those concerns translate in the real world. Carefully colour-coded floor mapping, accessible evacuation systems, and colour-contrasted anti-microbial (!) stanchions are just a few examples from the article.

When we mess up accessibility on the web, people miss out on important information, are locked out of systems, and can't buy things. When it's messed up in the real world, people can get sick, get injured, or die. That's quite a responsibility, and it's one which unfortunately gets little credit when people invariably look at new subway trains' design and pass quick judgement on the aesthetics.