Thoughts on the internal prototype

Hi Matters team,

My name is Ruby and I am a Product Manager. I'm currently working with Isaac to provide some feedback on your internal prototype. Hope you find some of this useful! Of course, please feel free to comment and extend on my thoughts :) Please accept my apologies for writing in English - I am unable to read/write in Chinese.

1. 'Extend' feature

The 'Extend' feature, allowing responses via is a fantastic idea for encouraging in-depth discussion that comments alone cannot provide. It's also great for helping people discover more perspectives.

How about allowing people to respond to a specific thought in the article with inline comments and/or articles (a la Medium)? This could facilitate interaction with all the thoughts in the article, not just the article as a whole.

I think there's also room for Medium to make improvements on this feature. Currently, in-line comments are hidden at the bottom of the article. If in-line comments were integrated into the original article, it could be better for the reader because it would allow readers to see other people's perspectives as they read the article. Of course, it could be tricky to keep the UI clean. One solution would be to use superscripts. Though how we might distinguish between footnotes would require further exploration.

2. Upstream/downstream UX

What is the difference between up/downstream? Is it that upstream articles refers to the articles that this article was spwaned from whereas downstream articles are articles that this article spawned?

I think that the current UX (placing upstream on the left and downstream on the right) triggers a cognitive bias that would make readers feel pressured to read the articles in the order of which it was written (i.e. from upstream to downstream). This could make readers reluctant to engage as it would be very demanding on time/effort to have to read the articles in chronological order.

An alternative UX may be to place both upstream and downstream articles all on one side.

Another alternative is to put the articles at the bottom. Perhaps, you may have actively decided against that in order

3. Using terms such as 'Spawned from' and 'Spawned'

This could help avoid the cognitive bias of having to read articles chronologically

4. Show more than 1 upstream/downstream article

Because an article could be inspired by many articles, not just one.

5. In the comments section, placing dates next to the user name could create a cleaner UX (a la Slack).

6. User profile - sections for profession, topics of interest/tags, articles written, comments made (to name but a few suggestions, there's plenty of room to play here I think)

7. It could be intersting to have a bird's eye/holistic/at-a-glance view of how discussions evolve and what the gist of the discussions were about.

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Thanks for reading!