Example communities using indented replies?

[CarolineS]

Hi ya'll!

I'd love to see some examples of communities that are using indented replies. I've found a few, but I'm looking for more for some design inspiration.

Examples I've found:

• Here on Atlas, replies aren't actually indented but the "in response to" is present 
  
•  Sephora Community shows indents (example thread). Responses are delineated with a dark vertical line:
• Atlassian community has indents; no other indication (e.g. a line / arrow). (example thread)
• Another example: Anaplan. (example thread)

Who else is using indented replies? I'd love to see!

[JasonHill]

Good topic @CarolineS. I'm also keen to see examples. 

So far I've not explored this territory much because I feel I would rather promote the idea that every reply is a reply to the whole community rather than an individual person. But I know some members would prefer it.

I'm struggling to make sense of the Sephora example. It seems like they have indenting to make it easier to follow a conversation, which is great, but sometimes newer replies are higher than older replies? What settings do you think they have in regards to post order?

Jason

[CarolineS]

@JasonHill Agreed that the Sephora example is confusing! 

[cgrinton]

We have threaded replies enabled in our community. For example, see here.

I think we're just using whatever design comes out of the box (although I'm not entirely sure about that). Seeing the indentation is most certainly helpful from the perspective of understanding the flow of conversation across multiple posts, but from a styling perspective what we have frankly feels somewhat bland.

[JMcJohnston]

We tested it out and made Threaded the default view, but overall our users didn't like it. They missed pagination, and were forced to 'load previous, or load more replies' which broke the flow for them, especially on big threads. 

So we have it as an option, but the default is linear. 

We're just in the process of redesigning that page, for both linear and threaded. So here's a basic mock-up of a threaded reply to a post. Just a simple indicator. 

[karolinalinda]

We do! Please check https://community.dynatrace.com/

An example of a threaded post here. In our case, the lack of pagination isn't a problem, as thread are usually several replies long. In 95% of the cases, there are less than 20 replies per topic.

[CarolineS]

Thank you!! Most of our threads are fairly short also; I'm sure we'll get a few complaints from our superusers about the longer ones though 😞

[CarolineS]

Thank you, @JMcJohnston! I really love that little arrow indicator. Good to know that we should be cautious / prepared to rollback or change the default if needed. Most of our threads are pretty short so I'm hopeful. It seems like having indented replies is a better experience for the majority of threads, but a pretty crummy experience for the outliers w/ the weird "load more". 

[CarolineS]

Thanks @cgrinton! 

[JMcJohnston]

Yeah you can just set the default as Linear, but allow people to switch to Threaded if they want - which is what we decided to do after making the default Threaded. 

[TeroRe]

I dont understand who uses threading, it is so difficult to follow where the new comments are. Just like Facebook group, when there are active discussion it is annoying to follow the whole discussion, to see where the new comments are. You have to scroll whole thread all the time.

[ruthneighbors]

I'm curious what you ended up deciding upon for your design. 

[CarolineS]

Hi @ruthneighbors -

You can see our implementation for yourself - check it out on a thread here: https://community.meraki.com/t5/Security-SD-WAN/changing-unencrypted-PAP-on-the-Meraki-side-so-I-can...

We have a max of 3 levels of indentation (IIRC) and we set the number of replies per page to 100 (or whatever the max is, I forgot)

Surprisingly, even our super users seem to like it/ no complaints!

Cheers!

[Claudius]

In our community with a more technical audience we've also rolled out threaded view. Similar setup with a maximum indentation depth of 3. See an example topic here:
https://community.dataiku.com/t5/Setup-Configuration/MySQL-database-connection/td-p/8332

I have to say that the Meraki layout with boxes for each message makes it easier to see which depth a reply is in. So a designer takeaway is that the left hand message box border needs some visual cue (left hand border, box around whole message, shadow etc.) to support the use of this feature.