Current state in Commons 6.x-2.x

We have several places where community member can see changes / content:

1) Site area:

  1. Site Home page: Only three posts from each group member is part of (changes visible)
  2. Site Activity Stream: All posts from each group member is part of (changes invisible )

2) Group area:

  1. Group home page: All posts from group with changes, summary and other data visible + filtering
  2. Group Activity Stream: All posts from group without visible changes
  3. Group Filter By Term page: 1. step: All tags that appear in group; 2. step: Content in table tagged with selected term

3) User area:

  1. User Activity Stream: All posts from each group member is part of (changes invisible)
  2. User Track page: Content in table with changes and some other data visible + sorting
  3. My content: Unread/My/All content in table with changes and some other data visible + sorting + mark as read action

Proposal

As a community member, I'd like to have only one consistent UI for viewing content (changes) on site / groups.

That could be maybe accomplished by merging Home Page and Activity Stream interfaces with adding By Term / Group as a block or buttons above activity to provide users ability to filter content.

Then we could have only two areas: site and group scope with identical or slightly different UI.

Comments

izkreny’s picture

izkreny commented
Issue summary: View changes

Heh..correcting bad English. :/ -- m.m

izkreny’s picture

izkreny commented
Issue summary: View changes

Added one UI that I missed before...

crimsondryad’s picture

crimsondryad commented

Hrm, for my use case ( a company intranet in which I will be part of many groups ), I'd like the ability to keep some of that separate or I'll lose the stream too quickly. I think the Dashboard is a really great place for that kind of thing. Maybe the answer is we set up some views with this content and make them available as blocks on the Dashboard by default. Then people can move around what is important to them and remove it if they don't like it. I understand that folks should have one place to see their stuff, I'm just not as on board about merging it all together.

ezra-g’s picture

ezra-g commented

Thanks for the thoughtful suggestion, @mariomaric!

This maps closely to what's proposed in the Commons MVP. We've started some initial designs internally within Acquia and are working to flesh them out a bit but will be sure to post them publicly for review ASAP - I think they'll address what you've raised pretty closely.

izkreny’s picture

izkreny commented
Issue summary: View changes

Another silly lang error...

izkreny’s picture

izkreny commented
Title: As a community member, I'd like to have only one consistent UI for viewing content (changes) on site / groups » Design the Activity interface
Issue tags: +Needs design

@ezra-g: If mentioned designs were included in now paused design exercise from your Twitter post - then you addressed what I was thinking pretty much closely, 90% for sure, if not 99%! :)

I changed issue title and added tag - or maybe #1558304: Design the site homepage is containing in itself also design for activity stream?

@crimsondryad: Hm, personally I don't like dashboard philosophy (even @ d.o), and as far as I can see neither other prominent social networks do.

But, I agree it would be nice to be able to filter content that you want to see, either by going to specific group you are interested, or, by having somewhere (block, or above activity stream) option to filter content by group.
That kind of filter functionality exist in Facebook via Friend Lists (block method) and in Google+ via Circles (buttons above activity stream).

I prefer G+ approach - it's mobile friendlier I guess. ;)

crimsondryad’s picture

crimsondryad commented

@mariomaric I understand what you're saying about the dashboard philosophy. I don't know that I'm married to the idea either. We want a walled garden where only authenticated users will see any content. In that scenario, what would their home page be? The closest thing I could come up with is the Dashboard. We want to give specific groups of users ( like customer service, IS, Marketing ) links specific to apps that they will use to make the intranet more "sticky". I also wanted them to be able to reorganize what they had to be useful personally. Elgg's ability to do walled gardens and private / public groups out of the box is really nice, the code is just a pain to work with.

I guess we could rework it to what we needed for ourselves. My vision for D7 Commons was for social / collaborative intranets, so I've been making suggestions with that in mind for what would result in easier setup for that use case. But maybe that's not what the community in general had in mind.

ezra-g’s picture

ezra-g commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

This is addressed by the Commons interactive prototype: http://groups.drupal.org/node/244663

ezra-g’s picture

ezra-g commented
Issue summary: View changes

Slightly changed proposal to reflect title change. ;) -- m.m