UI Pathways: 2 - 'Return a Shard'

The invocation of these pathways were established by @kieran in the original thread which should be read for the pre-amble). This thread is for discussion of this Pathway only

Pathway 2 from the home page. Visting this view you can easily determine if you hold shards for anyone by simply selecting a friend from the dropdown and it shows you a list of shards you hold for that person. If there are none, you hold none! Replaces the OthersShards / DarkCrystalFriendsIndex view as we no longer display this as an endless list. Makes the UI significantly less cluttered, a good thing IMO.

Views:

• ReplyNew - The Container view
• ShardList - Lists the Shards based on the scoped dataset
• ShardShow - A component / view of an individual shard (contained within the ShardIndex)

Components:

• Select
• DoubleCheck - Restates your selections and sends a message asking you to double check.
• AreYouSure
• CheckboxList
• Recipient
• Timestamp

Opinion: I think we should keep the requirement that someone cannot return a shard to an ssb account unless it is "requested" in-band. We should have an ample warning saying the the shardholder. Have you rung your friend to check it is them?

This thought occured to me when I was checking out the corporate dark crystal

Here is what they do:

It gives you radio options and if you pick anything other than "Yes I have spoken with my friend on the Phone" then you are shown that warning. I think that's neat.

There is crossover in this Pathway with the work that @mix has been doing on Others Shards Design

@kieran I think I find the way mix has started to lay things out visually works for me, rather than a drop down list. I admit that I am a visual person, so I am biased towards that for sure. The other reasoning is that I like designs which show me the info I am looking for with as few clicks as possible. Seeing friends faces, in the others shards section shows me and highlights the relational aspect immediately. This feels congruent with what we are trying to acheieve.

Here is the mock up for ease of reference:

@kieran I really like your interface as the deeper level once a face / person has been clicked.

So I click on a face from mix's mock up and then I land in a modal where I am able to select the shards by tick boxes.

I would then get a warning such as the one that you have shown kieran but with the additional radio options from the facebook way. The action would only be successful one I select that I spoken to my friend on the phone.

I have pulled out each of the Pathways into their own threads.
These can be found:

• UI Pathways: 1 Home Page and 'Create a new Dark Crystal'
• UI Pathways: 2 - 'Return a Shard'
• UI Pathways: 3 - 'Recover a Crystal'
• UI Pathways: 4 - 'Forward Shards'

@kieran I think I find the way mix has started to lay things out visually works for me, rather than a drop down list. I admit that I am a visual person, so I am biased towards that for sure. The other reasoning is that I like designs which show me the info I am looking for with as few clicks as possible. Seeing friends faces, in the others shards section shows me and highlights the relational aspect immediately. This feels congruent with what we are trying to acheieve.

I really think people keep missing my point, the details of what the UI looks like, dropdown list or fluffy avatars, isn't the point. That's purely cosmetic and can be done anyway. The point, as I highlighted in bold and have stated several times in my posts, is to keep the Forward and Return functionality as far away from each other as possible to help alleviate possibility of user mistake. I've said I feel strongly about this and its a mistake to overlook this.

I don't deny what @mix has built is prettier than what my diagrams look like, there's no denying that. But the point I keep iterating over seems to keep falling on deaf ears and is the fundamental reason why I proposed these design approaches.

This isn't a piece of software that someone's going to be browsing. Its something you use with intention and direction. It has a specific set of purposes. You're going on a treasure hunt, its a story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So the number of clicks and how pretty it appears at the early stage seems irrelevant and a distraction from whats important: designing to help people use it correctly (so they don't mess up and return a set of shards to the coconut robber).

@kieran you might have missed the part where I said:

I also love the Pathways approach and feel this to be congruent with the trajectory towards the "Choose Your Own Adventure" Path. It is playful and yet serves the function to reduce mis-clicks.Great thinking.

I'm all for making forwarding very deliberate and distant from returning shards @kieran.
I think it could be in an "Advanced" tab when you click into a person and that might meet everyones needs?

My position is:

We won't know until we test with real humans - good to have branches which we can workshop with people. Any attempt we make at first will be a best guess.