Community Suggestion: Standardize menus between homepage, article, and category

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Standardize menus between homepage, article, and category

User Interface (UI) / User Experience (UX) · World management · Created by Those2Nerds
closed
interface menus

What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?

Your homepage, categories, and articles now have similar interfaces for editing and share many of the same options, but those options are in different menus for each of them. This makes it harder to find various settings and harder to learn the system and become comfortable with it.   Consider cover images:
  • Homepage: Click on the cover image behind the World title to set a global cover, or use the Styling menu to set a global cover and article default cover.
  • Articles: Click on the cover image behind the article title. No option in the Styling menu.
  • Categories: Click on the cover image behind the category title. No Styling menu. Use the Settings menu to change book-style cover and default article cover.
All three also have content sections you can toggle on or off:
  • Homepage & Categories: Use the eye icon to toggle sections off, or use the Settings menu to toggle on or off.
  • Articles: Use the Prompts menu to toggle sections on or off, even though content sections like the footer or sidebar top aren't prompts. To disable the sidebar, go to Settings.
For a final example, CSS classes and excerpt are available for both categories and articles, but it's in the Styling menu on articles and Settings for categories.   Having these similar features scattered in different places, sometimes available and sometimes not, is confusing even for veterans. I imagine it can be frustrating for someone new to the site and trying to learn how it all works.  

How does this feature request address the current situation?

There are multiple ways these could be standardized. This is my personal suggestion, with no knowledge of its technical feasibility:
  1. Give categories a Styling menu and move cover, CSS class, and excerpt options there instead of Settings. This will match how homepage and articles are configured.
  2. Make all covers selectable both by clicking behind the title & via the Styling menu. This matches how the homepage works and treats covers more consistently.
  3. Have article content sections (footer, sidebar, things that aren't prompts) toggleable from Settings. This will match how category and homepage sections work, puts them in the same place as toggling the sidebar, and lets the Prompts menu be dedicated to prompts.
The goal is to keep similar options in similar menus across all features. This will make the site easier to learn and use, even if change can be disruptive at first. Whether these specific steps are followed matters less than achieving that goal some way or another.  

What are other uses for this feature request?

The same principle can be applied to maps, timelines, and any other feature that has/will have a bottom toolbar. Options for covers, backgrounds, CSS, classes, excerpts, etc. would go in the Styling menu, while options for content sections, privacy states, navigation, etc. would be in Settings. More niche features may need some variation, but applying the same general idea will help everyone use those features.

The Team's Response

Thanks for the suggestion! Some of the examples you mention are intended to be different because they behave differently, such as the widgets in a homepage/category page behaving differently than article text fields (in the former, the widgets are on the page by default. In the latter, the text fields don't show by default unless they have content). However, we'll look into the other two to make everything more uniform. This is Closed because it's half-accepted and half-declined.
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25/300 Votes · +6600 points

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