Idea: Expand answers in notifications by tapping “Expand” link or pinching-open gesture for full answers on Quora (#89)

Purpose is to enable people to view notifications easily and scroll by looking at answers and more by reducing the number of taps needed.

Start on notifications, scroll down to view more notifications with Person 4 at the top, then tap “Expand” to see the details including answers (and note that some loading time may be required though try to do some preloading of some content and loading more content as the person scrolls more), scroll to the end of notifications by Person 7, then scroll back to the top and tap “Close” to return to concise notifications. Designed by D.J. Sherrets.

Quora today:

• Notifications appear for answers, when someone you subscribe to posts questions/answers, when questions are added to a topic you subscribe to, upvotes to you answers, follows of your questions or you, and more.
• Viewing a notification requires tapping it which then opens another view that shows the answer.
• So if you want to view 10 notifications, then that would be 10 taps to open the content, and 9 taps back to return to notifications. There’s an opportunity to do this in fewer taps.

Proposed idea:

1. Start on notifications. Scroll down to see the 7 total notifications.
2. Tap on “Expand V” to see that the answers and other notifications expand to show the full information.
3. Scroll down to see the expanded answers and more, then scroll back up to the top.
4. Then tap “Close” to return to the notifications list as before.

Comments:

• Opportunity is to enable people to view expanded notifications so the full answers can be seen.
• Note that if an answer is too long, then the user needs to tap on the answer or “Read More” to expand.
• Enable people to pinch open — meaning two fingers touching the screen moving away from each other — to open the notifications to show the actual answers details without having to leave the notifications screen.
• And people people to pinch close — meaning two fingers touching the screen moving towards each other — to close the notifications to return to the notifications as appearing today so it’s faster to navigate.
• Alternatively, when notifications are expanded, then consider including a bar on the right side for allowing to slowly drag finger down to navigate through all of the answers as per this design: https://medium.com/dj-sherrets/ideas-idea-side-bar-on-feed-to-drag-finger-slowly-to-quickly-move-through-feed-to-figure-which-a028d5e36943. Or even a design like this version that shows adjusting as dragging to show each answer after each drag: https://medium.com/dj-sherrets/idea-slowly-move-finger-down-side-bar-to-one-by-one-quickly-view-15-posts-in-one-continuous-cb3e0bcbfa56.
• A reason to not implement this may be that most users don’t get many notifications and so tapping to go view something doesn’t take much time.
• A related reason to not do this is that getting people to the fuller version can also include other links such as related questions and links to a person’s profile and more. And so perhaps that leads to people engaging with more parts of the site than if the full answers were viewed in notifications.

Designed by D.J. Sherrets.

© 2016 D.J. Sherrets