To provide another perspective on UI issues (in descending order of importance in my eyes):
I agree that the content pages need a better way to return to their location in the main tree, although I’m not exactly sure what that would look like. Having content appear within the tree itself has downsides, like wasting page space on tree structure illustration (roughly speaking I imagine navigating the tree and reading content as separate activities, and I don’t want them to interfere with each other). It’s not inconceivable that you could make the content available within the tree and on separate pages, so that users could choose how/where to read it.
I think having “+” expand on mouse hover is a very bad idea. I should be able to move my mouse around on the page without causing radical structural changes to what is displayed. (Moreover, mouse-hover stuff doesn’t tend to work so well with mobile).
The numbers serve some value to my eyes, but I’m not sure how much. I’d also consider having the numbers reflect the total number of children under each node, rather than just the number of immediate children. That gives you an idea of how much depth a particular subsection is covered in, and how much an undertaking it would be to read all of it, for example.
I agree that search is also important. You can do this the “dumb” way by just strapping a custom Google search to the page, or you can do something smarter that e.g. highlights which parts of the tree contain your search results (perhaps how many times, with totals at the parent nodes). This smarter search seems like a low priority, but once I came up with it I thought it was too cute not to share.
I disagree that clicking on + nodes is too hard, although I agree that it’s intuitive to expect clicking on the text of the parents to have the same effect. A simple solution would be to have the first child of every parent be a summary of that parent, but I’m not convinced any solution is necessary.
It’s not inconceivable that you could make the content available within the tree and on separate pages, so that users could choose how/where to read it.
That’s what I already secretly had in mind.
I disagree that clicking on + nodes is too hard, although I agree that it’s intuitive to expect clicking on the text of the parents to have the same effect.
I feel like even once it has been made true that clicking on the text or the ‘plus’ next to it do the same thing, there will still be some work to do to make the user ‘closer’ to the content. Basically, good and popular websites tend to give the user a payoff with one-ish click. Currently, I doubt that the EA Concepts site would be used, except for when people are linked to specific ideas. But I recognize that this is at least a somewhat subtle point.
To provide another perspective on UI issues (in descending order of importance in my eyes):
I agree that the content pages need a better way to return to their location in the main tree, although I’m not exactly sure what that would look like. Having content appear within the tree itself has downsides, like wasting page space on tree structure illustration (roughly speaking I imagine navigating the tree and reading content as separate activities, and I don’t want them to interfere with each other). It’s not inconceivable that you could make the content available within the tree and on separate pages, so that users could choose how/where to read it.
I think having “+” expand on mouse hover is a very bad idea. I should be able to move my mouse around on the page without causing radical structural changes to what is displayed. (Moreover, mouse-hover stuff doesn’t tend to work so well with mobile).
The numbers serve some value to my eyes, but I’m not sure how much. I’d also consider having the numbers reflect the total number of children under each node, rather than just the number of immediate children. That gives you an idea of how much depth a particular subsection is covered in, and how much an undertaking it would be to read all of it, for example.
I agree that search is also important. You can do this the “dumb” way by just strapping a custom Google search to the page, or you can do something smarter that e.g. highlights which parts of the tree contain your search results (perhaps how many times, with totals at the parent nodes). This smarter search seems like a low priority, but once I came up with it I thought it was too cute not to share.
I disagree that clicking on + nodes is too hard, although I agree that it’s intuitive to expect clicking on the text of the parents to have the same effect. A simple solution would be to have the first child of every parent be a summary of that parent, but I’m not convinced any solution is necessary.
That’s what I already secretly had in mind.
I feel like even once it has been made true that clicking on the text or the ‘plus’ next to it do the same thing, there will still be some work to do to make the user ‘closer’ to the content. Basically, good and popular websites tend to give the user a payoff with one-ish click. Currently, I doubt that the EA Concepts site would be used, except for when people are linked to specific ideas. But I recognize that this is at least a somewhat subtle point.