Guild Launch News
Private Message Improvements
Today we have released Private Messaging improvements. These improvements are focused on the main Private Messaging page and include the following changes and fixes:
1. The layout of the page has been made more uniform and compact. The same functionality is there, but laid out more uniformly and while utilizing less vertical space.
2. A preview of the full message (about 110 characters) is now provided.
3. The date is shown in the same style as Gmail: Time for message received today, Month and Day for messages received prior. The full time and date are still shown on the message if you view it.
4. The message preview in the message listing is designed to scale with your browser real estate. More real estate = more preview shown.
5. The Preview Pan is higher on the page which makes it easier to see that info is loading into it. The new preview options make it so you don't have to use the preview pane as much though.
In the new PM area we believe that a more common usage will be to scan messages, get the relevant info from the preview and then 'check all' and mark read without ever having to view a preview.
We've also fixed the following:
1. A visual issue where page controls were not shown on the last page has been fixed.
2. The To: and From: search were reversed, this has been fixed.
3. Paging will be maintained when marking items read or deleting items
Enjoy!
Stephen
1. The layout of the page has been made more uniform and compact. The same functionality is there, but laid out more uniformly and while utilizing less vertical space.
2. A preview of the full message (about 110 characters) is now provided.
3. The date is shown in the same style as Gmail: Time for message received today, Month and Day for messages received prior. The full time and date are still shown on the message if you view it.
4. The message preview in the message listing is designed to scale with your browser real estate. More real estate = more preview shown.
5. The Preview Pan is higher on the page which makes it easier to see that info is loading into it. The new preview options make it so you don't have to use the preview pane as much though.
In the new PM area we believe that a more common usage will be to scan messages, get the relevant info from the preview and then 'check all' and mark read without ever having to view a preview.
We've also fixed the following:
1. A visual issue where page controls were not shown on the last page has been fixed.
2. The To: and From: search were reversed, this has been fixed.
3. Paging will be maintained when marking items read or deleting items
Enjoy!
Stephen
Anemia. wrote:
There isn't as much room on the site as there are in many email clients because you have the site wrapper, ads, etc. So, we've played with a few different layouts and what we have is the best choice, in our opinion, with all of these things considered.
The typical PM in the system is 2-3 sentences. Given that relatively short length you don't need a lot of real estate to take the PM in and digest it. Personally, I load the page, scroll down about halfway then click through my unread PMs. The current layout is very efficient for that.
I expect that with the new layout we'll see half as many users actually using the preview pane to read PMs since the useful info for 90% of the PMs is in the preview line in the new layout, so instead of throwing those people who like the current preview pane for a loop we didn't change that element and instead focused on adding new ways to see the info and providing the preview line was a core element of this revamp. We will of course continue to observe and adapt, but I'm off to give Calendar functionality an upgrade.
-Stephen
Ever thought of a dual pane approach?
There isn't as much room on the site as there are in many email clients because you have the site wrapper, ads, etc. So, we've played with a few different layouts and what we have is the best choice, in our opinion, with all of these things considered.
The typical PM in the system is 2-3 sentences. Given that relatively short length you don't need a lot of real estate to take the PM in and digest it. Personally, I load the page, scroll down about halfway then click through my unread PMs. The current layout is very efficient for that.
I expect that with the new layout we'll see half as many users actually using the preview pane to read PMs since the useful info for 90% of the PMs is in the preview line in the new layout, so instead of throwing those people who like the current preview pane for a loop we didn't change that element and instead focused on adding new ways to see the info and providing the preview line was a core element of this revamp. We will of course continue to observe and adapt, but I'm off to give Calendar functionality an upgrade.
-Stephen