In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
- One suggestion per comment.
- Upvote all comments you’d like to see implemented.
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!
Not exactly a design issue, but still a matter of user experience: if a thread gets too deep and the site shows a "Continue thread" (or whatever it says) link, that link should load the rest of the thread into the current page using JavaScript, instead of sending you to a separate page to continue it.
(This may or may not be worth doing in an AJAXly way; it may work fine to just include the entire thread in the markup originally sent by the server, hide it with CSS by default, and have the link render it visible.)
How would you handle the increasing narrowness? Systems that enable really narrow comments are ugly to read. Livejournal's solution of drifting really narrow comments off to the right after the minimum width has been reached is really ugly and I don't know of any others.
Edit: Maybe the deep chunk of thread could float on top of the rest of the page somehow? (It'd have to be moveable and possible to scroll it alone)