FA+
Shop
Ferrox: design
17 years ago
I had the flu last week, took a couple sick days off work, and slept through the weekend, so not a lot done.
Rather, I figure I'll mention a few design decisions that have been made fairly arbitrarily but that aren't set in stone yet, so people can yell at me for wrecking the site and driving the community apart ahead of time.
Relationships
I don't like "watches". Right now, they cover the entire broad gamut of "I have some modicum of interest in this user; please spam me with everything e does." I'd like to split these semantics up. Access control, buddy lists, and anything semantically revolving around users you know should be done with a friends list. Who you watch should be independent of whether or not you consider them a "friend"; there are people I don't know but whose art I would like to watch, and there are people I do know who only upload gimmicky stuff I don't care much about. (Yes, this means I want to have separate watches. RSS for both individual users and my own watchlist would also be nice.)
Maybe "friends" should also have some other labels, since "friend" is in itself a bit vague, but those would probably be entirely for show.
Scraps and Featured Art
I hate the concept of scraps. It's completely arbitrary, unobvious when someone uses it or doesn't, and inflexible. On the other hand, I don't have any great ideas for replacing it. The UI could be improved, I suppose, but that's about all.
The next-best thing to do is to merge scraps with featured art; make them both just levels of how much you like a particular piece. This would let you have multiple featured pieces (several shown at once? latest shown? pick at random?) and switch between scrap/feature/normal at a click and be generally less grungy.
By You, For You
It may or may not be obvious at this point that I have a hardon for semantics. <p> means "this is a paragraph", dammit, and I want to smack people who use it as a generic container; lists should be in list tags; header text should use header tags. Similarly, I am uncomfortable with the number of users who have uploaded art they did not create. This is okay according to FA rules, yes, but a gallery of your art means "I made this", not "this is probably related to me somehow". In a more practical sense, this leads to double uploads, keeps artists from seeing all the comments and faves their art attracts, and just gets confusing if someone uploads both eir own art and gift art.
So! I'd like to generalize this "[user] made [artwork]" thing and let you pick one of several relationships you have with the art. Most notably would be "I made this" or "this was made for me", but it's also possible to have things like "I recorded this" or "this includes me" for cases like someone else photographing your fursuit or for art or photos not specifically meant for you but that include you or your character. This would also allow for collaborations and OCs to be uploaded just once but belong to multiple artists.
There are of course a lot of semantic nitpicks and implementation details to go over here, to make sure everything makes sense (if I commission art of me, it's both for me and contains me) and is easy for users to use, but that's what I get paid to figure out!
These would also probably have one combined set of comments; not sure how people feel about that. Presumably actual control over the work and description would be in the hands of the artist, if one exists, but it's possible everyone involved could get to contribute their own description. Cases with multiple artists are more complicated. The simplest solution is just to take the first attached artist as the primary artist and give em the final word.
Assuming this works out well enough, I may also scour existing uploads for duplicate uploads by both an artist and commissioner and allow them to merge the submissions if both agree.
Watchstream
Essentially sending a note for every new work uploaded by someone you're watching is ridiculous and unmanageable. I'd rather just provide a view of all your watchers' art, in the order it was uploaded backwards. No need to mark anything read, as it will (somewhat intelligently?) remember the last time you viewed the list and indicate so, but still go further back if you missed or skipped something. Even better, you can use an RSS reader and let that take care of marking old stuff.
Also, remembering page size. :V
User pages
Would like to split these up, too. Right now it's a piecemeal of recent activity with a half-assed profile. I'd like to have a more fleshed out recent-activity view (why only ONE recent-upload thumbnail?) with a minimal profile, and profiles separate, with more metadata and attempts to make use of some of it.
Not sure where shouts go in this.
Front page
Bit too static. Should be more useful to logged-in users, showing perhaps friends who are logged in, recent messages, a few recent watches, etc.
Recent uploads are of course still a staple, although I'd like some options besides that; "this was uploaded recently" is not very useful information on its own to me, and occasionally leads to floods and races and whatnot. This is part of the general problem of finding art you don't know about but might be interested in.
Braindump on the first things coming to mind that may be noticeably different. Not much of this is designed in yet, so it's very subject to change, although the next thing I do is probably going to be on this list since we're running out of basics to build. (Woohoo, almost at version 0.0.1...)
Rather, I figure I'll mention a few design decisions that have been made fairly arbitrarily but that aren't set in stone yet, so people can yell at me for wrecking the site and driving the community apart ahead of time.
Relationships
I don't like "watches". Right now, they cover the entire broad gamut of "I have some modicum of interest in this user; please spam me with everything e does." I'd like to split these semantics up. Access control, buddy lists, and anything semantically revolving around users you know should be done with a friends list. Who you watch should be independent of whether or not you consider them a "friend"; there are people I don't know but whose art I would like to watch, and there are people I do know who only upload gimmicky stuff I don't care much about. (Yes, this means I want to have separate watches. RSS for both individual users and my own watchlist would also be nice.)
Maybe "friends" should also have some other labels, since "friend" is in itself a bit vague, but those would probably be entirely for show.
Scraps and Featured Art
I hate the concept of scraps. It's completely arbitrary, unobvious when someone uses it or doesn't, and inflexible. On the other hand, I don't have any great ideas for replacing it. The UI could be improved, I suppose, but that's about all.
The next-best thing to do is to merge scraps with featured art; make them both just levels of how much you like a particular piece. This would let you have multiple featured pieces (several shown at once? latest shown? pick at random?) and switch between scrap/feature/normal at a click and be generally less grungy.
By You, For You
It may or may not be obvious at this point that I have a hardon for semantics. <p> means "this is a paragraph", dammit, and I want to smack people who use it as a generic container; lists should be in list tags; header text should use header tags. Similarly, I am uncomfortable with the number of users who have uploaded art they did not create. This is okay according to FA rules, yes, but a gallery of your art means "I made this", not "this is probably related to me somehow". In a more practical sense, this leads to double uploads, keeps artists from seeing all the comments and faves their art attracts, and just gets confusing if someone uploads both eir own art and gift art.
So! I'd like to generalize this "[user] made [artwork]" thing and let you pick one of several relationships you have with the art. Most notably would be "I made this" or "this was made for me", but it's also possible to have things like "I recorded this" or "this includes me" for cases like someone else photographing your fursuit or for art or photos not specifically meant for you but that include you or your character. This would also allow for collaborations and OCs to be uploaded just once but belong to multiple artists.
There are of course a lot of semantic nitpicks and implementation details to go over here, to make sure everything makes sense (if I commission art of me, it's both for me and contains me) and is easy for users to use, but that's what I get paid to figure out!
These would also probably have one combined set of comments; not sure how people feel about that. Presumably actual control over the work and description would be in the hands of the artist, if one exists, but it's possible everyone involved could get to contribute their own description. Cases with multiple artists are more complicated. The simplest solution is just to take the first attached artist as the primary artist and give em the final word.
Assuming this works out well enough, I may also scour existing uploads for duplicate uploads by both an artist and commissioner and allow them to merge the submissions if both agree.
Watchstream
Essentially sending a note for every new work uploaded by someone you're watching is ridiculous and unmanageable. I'd rather just provide a view of all your watchers' art, in the order it was uploaded backwards. No need to mark anything read, as it will (somewhat intelligently?) remember the last time you viewed the list and indicate so, but still go further back if you missed or skipped something. Even better, you can use an RSS reader and let that take care of marking old stuff.
Also, remembering page size. :V
User pages
Would like to split these up, too. Right now it's a piecemeal of recent activity with a half-assed profile. I'd like to have a more fleshed out recent-activity view (why only ONE recent-upload thumbnail?) with a minimal profile, and profiles separate, with more metadata and attempts to make use of some of it.
Not sure where shouts go in this.
Front page
Bit too static. Should be more useful to logged-in users, showing perhaps friends who are logged in, recent messages, a few recent watches, etc.
Recent uploads are of course still a staple, although I'd like some options besides that; "this was uploaded recently" is not very useful information on its own to me, and occasionally leads to floods and races and whatnot. This is part of the general problem of finding art you don't know about but might be interested in.
Braindump on the first things coming to mind that may be noticeably different. Not much of this is designed in yet, so it's very subject to change, although the next thing I do is probably going to be on this list since we're running out of basics to build. (Woohoo, almost at version 0.0.1...)
1. Re: Watches.
Would it be possible to allow users to choose what part of an artist's/user's updates they want to see? Could there be a way to deactivate journal notices if one so desires, or to only view journals, etc.?
2. Re: Commissions
It is true that people can get confused with this. Have you considered adding a separate section for that? So art by a user goes in one gallery and commissions go in another? And in the event that the artist is on FA and already posted it here (which isn't always the case, unfortunately), what about "shortcuts?" That is, a way for a user to request a link in their commission gallery that just goes to the artist's own submission on their own gallery? The artist would have to approve it before it could be set up, of course. Just to make sure people don't run around claiming random characters as their own.
Commissions: This is kinda what I mean; commissioned art wouldn't be in the user's main gallery. And the same image would be "owned" in some sense by both the artist and the commissioner; the artist's gallery and commissioner's.. commission gallery would link to the same page.
I actually thought about this issue myself when I first put pictures for me in my gallery, and as a result don't upload anything made for me that isn't already uploaded elsewhere on FA (that stuff I just link to). xP
While I have no real problem with the way that submission notifications go right now, I will say that I also love your ideas for BYFY. Having a series of checkboxes, of which one has to be marked before a submission can be uploaded, will hopefully get people thinking about their submission. That funny picture of a dog you found online doesn't fit under one of these categories? Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be uploading it here. Think you can upload some artist's random picture you liked? Do you really want to click the "I made this" button just to get it through? Congratulations, you're an art thief; the admins don't have to wonder, you just admitted to it.
Exciting as always. :D
That's an interesting point; this would actually have people actively admitting that they created (etc) something.
Re. front page: Replace the all-types box with a specific section for image submissions. The other types each already have their own sections, they don't need to appear mixed in with the images too. Preferably, enable the user to select which types of recent submissions will be shown to them (when logged in, of course) on the front page, what order the sections will appear in (images first, music/audio first, etc.), and how many of each type to display (i.e., "show me the 12 most recent image uploads, 8 songs, 4 stories, and no poetry").
Complicated, probably, but from what I've seen 'round the Internet, giving your users more options is (if done well) always a good thing.
Huh. Well, oldest-first would rely entirely on how clever the code is about guessing where you last read to, or it will start in the wrong place, but that should be doable.
I've heard people ask for splitting it up by artist, too, which shouldn't be a problem.. except for the paging and last-read figuring, hm.
Agreed that having an all-types box is ridiculous. I'm not sure I really like splitting recent uploads into such a limited set of categories, though; why do music, stories, and poetry get their own sections when artwork, which comprises the vast majority of submissions, is all lumped together?
So as the artist, you create a submission, and during that you can fill in Commissioned by/Starring/Collab With fields with the other peoples usernames. When the image is uploaded, the people in those boxes get the option to display that art on their pages in an additional gallery (you could have it automatically displayed, but that could be open to abuse)
Its better than having users specify other peoples art as something they are in or have commissioned (again, open to abuse and misinterpretation) and neatly fixes the problem of duplicate submissions wasting space, and you have one source of comments. I don't know about anyone else, but I like to read the comments people post about art I have commissioned.
Well, why not combine the ideas: The person uploading is the 'owner', and has to specify whether they are the artist, the commissioner, the friend with the scanner/working internet, or whatever, as well as specifying the other roles. And then everybody involved gets to choose if they want the picture displayed in the proper section of their gallery.
If you want to be fancy, you can let the current 'owner' offer another involved user to take over 'ownership', which of course they'd have to accept for anything to happen. Solves various cases of nitpicking, like if an artist uploads something that they've sold all rights to, they can actually let the buyer have control, or the cases you mention. Or people leaving FA could donate their galleries to another user.
SkieFire's point was that in order to prevent spurious claims, it makes sense to have one user in control of who gets to be listed as artist(s), commissioner, character(s), flash animator, and so on... but SkieFire assumes that it will necessarily be the artist who does that.
I want to combine that with the point that for various practical reasons, it might be useful for some one else to do the upload -- the commissioner being the role we're trying to grandfather in from the BYFY rule, but other relations to the artist are clearly possible.
And to avoid other abuses, the work should clearly only appear in the uploader's 'Uploaded' folder, if at all, unless the uploader admits to (and admits to claim) other roles. For instance, only when user named as artist acknowledges that they are in fact the artist, _and_ want it displayed as such, should it appear in their 'Submissions'. And the same goes for every other role.
Now you may decide that this is too complicated -- I wouldn't worry about the implementation myself, but explaining it would be harder -- but as I see it, the other possibilities are to make a rule that FA only carries artwork if the artist can be bothered to upload it themself (and their internet works), or to open up for other users to claim various relations to a work unchecked.
The transfer of control or ownership is a frill on top of this, as long as all users involved stay active, there's no problem with the uploader being in control. The transfer could be made one-way, too, only going to someone listed as an artist of the work. Except for the 'inherited collection' idea, but that's probably so rare an event that the admins should be involved anyway, and a coder could make a snippet of SQL to do it in each specific case.
(I'm not a heavy user of FA myself (yet), I'm getting into the discussion mostly because I find the analysis interesting).
Scraps – I kinda like scraps, I think of it as a place for memes and really rough concept sketches
By you, for you – agreed! It would be nice if the watchers of the receiving artist were notified if they don’t watch the artist who posts it
Watch stream – I like the current system, being able to see newest first, oldest last, and being able to mark as read or unread
User pages – Yay more thumbnails! Recent submissions, journals, favs, and shouts are a must.
Front page – I like the sound of that!
What do you like about the current watch system? :/
Also in your more recent journal you asked for more feature requests, so here goes. For 3D animations would it be possible for users to upload high quality video (not flash, maybe Quicktime or something) as long as the file isn't very big. It would also be nice if stories and other text could be uploaded and previewed in more formats (being able to see MS Word documents as text in the web page). I was also wondering how audio was previewed. Does FA have a preset viewer or is it up to the browser/OS to determine what player to use in the web page?
If it's multiple, why not just come back to the list later?
The problem with the current solution is that it's a ton of overhead for both the server and users. If one of the more popular artists uploads a single image, the system could have to fire off up to ten thousand notices. Then every single one of those users has to mark that notice as read. A lot of users apparently don't even bother with that (or might have left the site or gone on vacation etc), and collect thousands upon thousands of new-submission messages, which is a ridiculous waste of space and after a while will start to slow everything down.
The worst part of this is that it has no real benefits in the common case, where you just go through new art and then you're done.
I'm not sure how much high quality video you could really fit in limited size, but it's a possibility, I supposed.
I don't want to support Word. In fact, I don't want Ferrox to even accept Word uploads. There is almost no reason at all you should be saving a story as a Word document. Not only is it just a gross misuse of technology, but the file becomes 30KB bigger, everyone has to load this gigantic program to read it, it's a security risk, etc. Real support for (basic) RTF is probably going to happen. Other possibilities include bbcode or lightweight "natural" formatting languages like Markdown, but I don't want to force people to rewrite formatting specifically for FA.
Right now audio is shown in a little Flash applet, which I do not like; it is a standard audio format and I should be able to play it in whatever I told my browser to use to play audio. Problem being, of course, that Quicktime tends to consume that position and it frankly sucks ass.
Also, if I could, I would like to test the beta version when you get to that stage (I do love testing beta stuff, I had Vista RC 1 for a couple months and I've had beta and RC Service pack 1 for a while now too)
Communication as to how you're going about this would probably be a healthy addition to this kind of journal.
I watch the Suggestions forum and 'neer is working on a list of commonly-requested items, yes. The people ultimately using the product can often be the worst people to design it, though.
The other problem is that users are remarkably good at training themselves to ignore problems and accept inefficiency, and even complain when workflow problems are fixed.
Since I don't really use the site, though, I am clearly unbiased. 8)
Interesting design approach: thanks for those honest replies, Eevee. :)
Must admit that there would be more to be said for that if FA had a dedicated code-cutting side /only/ turning functional into technical; to be somewhat distanced from user distractions. But that's a large gap to mind there and still very much short-staffed with regards to active persons, I suspect.
Is a somewhat blanket statement on "users" (presuming all to be "non-expert"), but know what y'mean 'bout lack of appreciation for what goes on behind the scenes (casual acceptance of bloatware such as the usual run-of-the-mill MSN products is a good indicator of that ^^). However, it is they who actually have to use the system and thus it /is/ a "problem" for the business if what's delivered fails to meet those needs/expectations in large part. (Not that FA ain't already "walking on water" on that score!).
Was interesting, but not entirely surprising, to read Preyfar is apparently the only person cutting through "suggestions", unannounced. Yep, he does have a reasonable gut feel for what would be "good to have" (hopefully mostly unbiased by personal wishlist) but that gets a thumbs-down for micromanagement yet again. Hopefully there's some /proper/ bridging over to the technical (DB/code) design, too, not just a single string of individuals holding everything together.
Aside from that, Preyfar doing all the selection work does absolutely nothing to help build up the value of useful/knowledgeable community members (potentially members of staff) who could have done most of the collating/cross-checking whilst he focused (largely) on other key business matters with oversight responsibilities onto this domain. That has been done successfully in the past - even when hamstrung - with bug-fixing + minor enhancements; to have such a small task force set up. If that hadn't been done at the time, FA would now be totally dead in the water, I'm fairly sure... Anyhow, there is no such "benefit" to be gained in the current untrusting approach, but at least that will hopefully not go back around the same old cycle things have been in these past 18+ months to try to keep the ball rolling. (Thanks again for personal ongoing work on that :)
Cheers,
David.
p.s. "commonly-requested items" is far from the be-all and end-all, of course. It would be easier just to clone dA if merely looking for blinkered popularism and broadbrush functionality. ;>