Make next / previous universally non-confusing (possibly with thumbs?)

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Right now we have next/previous buttons like: []

The problem: it's confusing. I made a suggestion on how to fix this once, by reversing the order of the arrows: http://bugs.foocorp.net/issues/423

However I'm not sure this really makes things clearer. Either ordering is confusing here:

• [] is what we used to do but this is confusing because our galleries go in the opposite direction (newer on left, older on right), which is what makes sense for a gallery to be like.
• [] is what we do now, but that's also totally confusing. Who really expects arrows to point this way? Not me (even despite filing that old ticket). Imagine reading a webcomic ordered this way. That would be crazy! So here's some suggested resolutions:
• Switch back to the old behavior and add text to the arrows, like []
• Add smaller-thumbnail support (75-100px?) and make these thumbnails the navigation.

I'd opt for #1... maybe we can make #2 a different ticket and add an ajaxy "quick browser" like flickr has that's scrollable left and right, and make that separate from the current next/previous arrow buttons. Bonus point: doing #1 will fill up some of that glaring whitespace on those current buttons ;)

Dropping this in Jef's lap! Jef, what do you think?

[Jef van Schendel]

Heh, I've got a feeling we've been flipflopping on this a couple of times now.

Anyhow, here's something else to think about... Right now, the next/previous buttons link to next and previous images by that user. But say you're on a page that lists all the images with the tag "new". You click on one, and then start browsing by clicking next, next, next. I think one would expect to only see the images from that tag page, not all the images by that user.

The same problem would occur with, say, searches. Though that's still far away.

A few notes:

• GMail solves this by making the next and previous buttons search-dependent. So if you just searched for emails from Jessica and open one, the navigation buttons will browse only through the other results from that search. I assume this is... pretty difficult to do, but what do I know?
• Another way can be seen at for instance Dribbble (and to a lesser extent Flickr, too). If you go to the front page, you'll see the most popular images. Click one of these, and the right sidebar will have two navigation areas. One is labeled "MORE from POPULAR" and browses through the other popular images you just saw. The one below that says "MORE by [user]" and browses through the rest of the user's submissions.

For now, we can at least at labels to the buttons, I think. That's easy enough to do and will make it a lot clearer.

Interestingly, GMail also used to do this (with "newer" and "older" labels) but they've since thrown that out during the Google redesign.

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Very true, and one way to handle making the next / previous buttons less confusing in that circumstance is to do something like:

• /u/cwebber/m/swimmin-with-the-fishes?in_global_tags=fishes
• /u/cwebber/m/swimmin-with-the-fishes?in_user_tags=fishes
• /u/cwebber/m/swimmin-with-the-fishes?in_collection=fishy_fishy_fish

and use that context to figure out what group of things this is in so that the prev / next buttons are setup correctly.

[Jef van Schendel]

43.png

[Jef van Schendel]

As of now, I've changed it to use suggestion #1 from the ticket ("Switch back to the old behavior and add text to the arrows").

Here's a small screenshot.

[maiki interi]

Christopher Webber wrote:

Very true, and one way to handle making the next / previous buttons less confusing in that circumstance is to do something like:

• /u/cwebber/m/swimmin-with-the-fishes?in_global_tags=fishes
• /u/cwebber/m/swimmin-with-the-fishes?in_user_tags=fishes
• /u/cwebber/m/swimmin-with-the-fishes?in_collection=fishy_fishy_fish

and use that context to figure out what group of things this is in so that the prev / next buttons are setup correctly.

If there is another way to create media context streams, I would prefer it. For completely selfish reasons, I am a big fan of sane URLs, and I copy and paste links all day long.

An idea would be to provide smart default contexts (if coming from a tag page, then load "all" and "tag" contexts, whereas coming from a user page loads "user" and "collection" [when we get those ^_~]).

I am not sure on how to go about it, but we should ping the general populace on this.

[Caleb Davis]

Way to go, Jef! The new buttons look great. BTW, GMG looks really beautiful in general.

[Jef van Schendel]

Closing this ticket.

I think we definitely need to look at what Chris and maiki were talking about above, but that should be a new ticket. To at least have some clarity, I've added "? Browsing media by [uploader]" above the navigation buttons.

And thanks, Caleb! :)

[Will Kahn-Greene]

The original url for this bug was ​http://bugs.foocorp.net/issues/504 .