Decidim Redesign
🎨 Community participatory process for contributing to the Decidim redesign
Over the past few weeks, we've had some discussions with the redesign team that we want to share with the community.
When we have started to review the detail page of the “Proposals” component, we have realized that we need to establish another hierarchy between the different actions that can be enabled.
We start from the analysis that the current layout of the buttons generates confusion and saturates the interface. Therefore, we think that we have to establish a hierarchy and perhaps rename some of the actions. All this with the aim of simplifying the interface and clarifying what each action is for.
The hypotheses* with which we are working are:
- That some actions lose weight and move to a more secondary level.
- Rethink the name of the “endorsements” and change it to a more intuitive one.
- Remove the counter for the number of "Followers" and rename it, since we have detected that it can be confused with the number of supports and/or adhesions.
- Separate the “Turn on notifications” action from the “Mark as favorite” action.
*These are hypotheses we are working on and are not definitive. Soon we will share a mockup with the latest advances in the redesign.
Discussion Questions:
- According to your experience, how do you understand the action of endorse? How would you improve it?
- Should endorsements and supports coexist?
- What action do you consider to be the most important within the proposal component?
- Do you think it should be possible to support without reading the description of the proposal?
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4 comments
Segons la teva experiència, com s’entén l’acció d’adherir-se? Com podem millorar-la?
* En general la gent no entén el concepte "Adherir-se" i és un problema important quan està activat simultàniament amb l'opció "Dona suport". L'opció de substituir-lo per un standard com "Like" és molt més intuïtiu i resol el problema de la confusió.
Haurien de conviure les adhesions i els suports?
* Només en el cas que està claríssimament diferenciat, com ho és la proposta d'usar l'standard del botó "m'agrada".
Quina acció consideres que és la més important dins del component propostes?
En aquest ordre:
* La identificació clara i fàcil de totes les possibilitats d'interacció amb la proposta
* Donar suport
* La identificació de l'existència d'esmenes (si s'escau) i la possibilitat de fer-ne (quan estan habilitades)
* L'exploració de comentaris (a favor, en contra, neutral)
* La resposta a la proposta
* La possibilitat de "guardar" una proposta en col·leccions/carpetes millor per part de l'usuari
* La possibilitat d'explorar i visibilitzar les relacions d'aquella proposta amb altres de forma compacta i entenedora (si s'ha traslladat a component pressupostos, per exemple, si és resultat d'una esmena o té diverses esmenes, si és una proposta relacionada amb altres continguts... )
Creus que s’ha de poder donar un suport sense llegir el cos de la proposta?
* No. Simplifica la possibilitat d'errors amb el botó "canviant" de les targetes. I és bastant raonable que per donar suport a una proposta s'hagi almenys d'obrir.
Conversation with Antti Hukkanen
I just wanted to share that the hypothesis seems in line with our experiences. Administrators here do not generally understand the "support" and "endorsement" features, even after trying to explain them. We have never used the "endorsements" feature in our instances due to its complexity and it causing only confusion.
From the participant perspective, we have heard great confusion for the "support" feature which is why we generally suggest avoid using this feature. Some participants have thought that "support" is same as voting, as if they were signing a citizen initiative that they are generally more familiar with. I don't know if this issue can be solely fixed with naming (it's more about understanding the whole process) but in case this feature was closer to "liking" something, people would be much more familiar with the concept and not confuse it with voting. I don't know how well that would fit the democratic context, though, because I understand that in some contexts the "support" terminology is more appropriate.
I also spotted the mention about "favorites", which we implemented in the past for Helsinki (see the Helsinki platform for reference). It is extracted to its own module but you need to specifically apply that to each module where you want to add favorites (maybe this could be a core feature?):
https://github.com/mainio/decidim-module-favorites
Given these together with the supports (or "likes", either one), I think it has to be extremely clear what is their difference. What is a "support" and what is a "favorite"? More options generates more confusion.
Regarding the following feature, I don't think it's even relevant information how many people are following something (maybe for admins who can get the info from the database if needed). I think this feature should be more personal to the users, just providing them the ability to follow something and not showing how many people follow. I think it might make it clearer if this feature was named "notifications", so that people could "turn notifications on/off" for a given item or "manage notification settings" when they could get more control whether they want to follow a specific item (e.g. a proposal) or the whole participatory space. So I think the hypothesis is spot on regarding this.
If it was "notification settings", I think it wouldn't have to be visible on the screen all the time and it could be hidden under some settings menu where power users could turn notifications on (or other users when assisted). Maybe an active/inactive bell icon hidden under some personal settings?
Hi Antti.
Actually, we translated supports into votes in French (anonymous, can be limited and counted), and endorsements are quite useful when considered as likes (public and unlimited). But a revised wording and the addition of alternative options would be great!
I completely agree on the "following" information being irrelevant to users and taking too much space/attention in the current version.
Yep, this is the problem with this feature that it is so context specific, depending how it is used. In some context, "vote" is more appropriate, in some context "support" is more appropriate and in some context "like" is more appropriate (i.e. showing there is interest for this particular proposal/idea, not "voting" on it).
The problem with the "vote" terminology would be in a standard PB process where the "voting" generally refers to the PB voting phase (=budgets).
In Finland we have used this feature once for the purpose of showing the city officials what type of ideas generate most interest. It caused confusion among the participants as some thought that "supporting" means "voting" the idea and then they later found out that there was a separate PB voting phase (=budgets) after the voting had already closed.
We listened to the people and later decided not to use this feature at all. The less different actions there are, the clearer it is for the users what is expected from them.
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