Hi all,
I was hoping to get some feedback on a new notification that I
have been working on. You can see the new "What is going on"
notification (alias "Monthly status reminder") by visiting your
profile at
<http://groupserver.org/p/>
and then add gs-profile-status.html to the end of the URL.
The goal of the notification is to improve the experience of
group members. To that end each group member will be informed
about what has been happening over the last month each group, and
what can be improved (tech-wise). The README for the product that
supplies the notification lists all that is planned
<https://github.com/groupserver/gs.profile.status.base> However,
the notification is about half-done now, so it is a good time to
show everyone and solicit feedback.
The bulk of the notification lists the groups each person belongs
to, broken down by site. If you are an administrator the
notification provides a quick way to administer the site, and
start a group. For each group it summarises the activity in the
last calendar month, and encourages the member to post (if that
is possible). Still to come are profile photos of the group
members, and possibly posted images where that is possible.
At the bottom, somewhat lost after all the information about the
groups, is the profile information of the group member, with
encouragement to add more. Included with that is some information
about the email addresses, with encouragement to add more.
❦
There are two major technical challenges for the notification:
mobile email clients, and desktop email clients.
I have tried to design this notification so it works well for
mobile email clients, because that seems to be what vast numbers
of people use <http://emailclientmarketshare.com/> I tried to
space the links out, so fat fingers on slippery screens can hit
the links easily; I tended to use faux-buttons a lot to make the
link target bigger. The notification can also narrow down quite a
long way. One thing that needed to be dropped to accommodate
mobile clients is the email-address of the group: there is a link
("send an email"), but an address in a <code> element cannot
wrap, and caused the notification to be too wide. Fighting to
make an email-address that can wrap then caused issues with the
desktop email clients.
Mailing-list managers, even awesome ones like GroupServer, are
also used a lot on desktops. Microsoft Outlook (bless) is a big
player here. It is a… challenge to code for, as it uses Microsoft
Word (yes, the word-processor) as the HTML rendering engine. To
accommodate this a table-based layout is used in the
notification. Thankfully the retro Helvetica and grey style of
GroupServer translates well to email.
Balancing the requirements of Apple Mail on iOS against Microsoft
Outlook on the desktop has been a challenge. Sadly I am only
really going on hope that I have it right, as there is no way we
can afford the cost of testing :(
I was hoping to get some feedback on a new notification that I
have been working on. You can see the new "What is going on"
notification (alias "Monthly status reminder") by visiting your
profile at
<http://groupserver.org/p/>
and then add gs-profile-status.html to the end of the URL.
The goal of the notification is to improve the experience of
group members. To that end each group member will be informed
about what has been happening over the last month each group, and
what can be improved (tech-wise). The README for the product that
supplies the notification lists all that is planned
<https://github.com/groupserver/gs.profile.status.base> However,
the notification is about half-done now, so it is a good time to
show everyone and solicit feedback.
The bulk of the notification lists the groups each person belongs
to, broken down by site. If you are an administrator the
notification provides a quick way to administer the site, and
start a group. For each group it summarises the activity in the
last calendar month, and encourages the member to post (if that
is possible). Still to come are profile photos of the group
members, and possibly posted images where that is possible.
At the bottom, somewhat lost after all the information about the
groups, is the profile information of the group member, with
encouragement to add more. Included with that is some information
about the email addresses, with encouragement to add more.
❦
There are two major technical challenges for the notification:
mobile email clients, and desktop email clients.
I have tried to design this notification so it works well for
mobile email clients, because that seems to be what vast numbers
of people use <http://emailclientmarketshare.com/> I tried to
space the links out, so fat fingers on slippery screens can hit
the links easily; I tended to use faux-buttons a lot to make the
link target bigger. The notification can also narrow down quite a
long way. One thing that needed to be dropped to accommodate
mobile clients is the email-address of the group: there is a link
("send an email"), but an address in a <code> element cannot
wrap, and caused the notification to be too wide. Fighting to
make an email-address that can wrap then caused issues with the
desktop email clients.
Mailing-list managers, even awesome ones like GroupServer, are
also used a lot on desktops. Microsoft Outlook (bless) is a big
player here. It is a… challenge to code for, as it uses Microsoft
Word (yes, the word-processor) as the HTML rendering engine. To
accommodate this a table-based layout is used in the
notification. Thankfully the retro Helvetica and grey style of
GroupServer translates well to email.
Balancing the requirements of Apple Mail on iOS against Microsoft
Outlook on the desktop has been a challenge. Sadly I am only
really going on hope that I have it right, as there is no way we
can afford the cost of testing :(