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.
Published in
4 min readMar 25, 2016
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:
- Start on notifications. Scroll down to see the 7 total notifications.
- Tap on “Expand V” to see that the answers and other notifications expand to show the full information.
- Scroll down to see the expanded answers and more, then scroll back up to the top.
- 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.
© 2016 D.J. Sherrets