My Little Pony Request: please consider adding Favorites to the Mobile Site menu.

June 6, 2011 1:58 PM

My Little Pony Request: please consider adding Favorites to the Mobile Site menu.

I read MetaFilter and AskMe often enough that I've got them on an iPhone home screen—the mobile site is great! But I'm also the sort of person who often uses Favorites as a bookmarking tool, and getting to my favorites is harder than it needs to be on mobile. Right now it's:

1. Load MeFi homepage
2. Skip to menu
3. Click on My Profile
4. Click on the number after "Favorites" (carefully; this page doesn't use the mobile stylesheet, but that's another request for another day)

That brings up my favorited posts. If I want my favorited comments I need to

1. Skip to menu again
2. Click on User Favorites: Comments

If you were to add Favorites to the home page Site Menu (preferably on all the subsites) it would save me at least one click and a page load every single time I do this. And if you added both Favorited Posts and Favorited Comments to the home page site menu it could save me three clicks and two page loads. I use these pages all the time. Why, just think of all the clicks you could spare me, not to mention the extra page rendering you could spare the dear server!

Not everyone uses/likes Favorites, I know. You could put them near the bottom of the site menu (though I'd leave Search and Sign Out at the very bottom to keep them easy to find). But if you don't like My Little Pony Request, I'm afraid I'll have to...<sniff>...bookmark the Favorites page.

posted by Songdog to Feature Requests at 1:58 PM (17 comments total)

There's a serious premium on real estate on the mobile view right now; pretty much the only stuff we have on the menu is super-big-ticket navigation. I dig that this is something that would save you some clicks, but I don't think it's something that's broadly needed in a way that'd justify that change to the menu.

If you find yourself using those two pages a lot, the simplest solution on your end may be to just create a couple of bookmarks, one for each, so that you can get at them in one or two clicks instead of navigating the way you currently do.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:01 PM on June 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yeah I have a MeFi folder with bookmarks to recent activity, favorites, and the admin panel. As much as I sympathize with your use case [and agree that a mobile version of profile pages is a good idea] pushing Favorites up front like that isn't something we're likely to do.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:05 PM on June 6, 2011

You could also bookmark one or the other and use the mobile menu at the bottom of either page to switch back and forth between the two.

As cortex mentioned the mobile menu is already at the limit of an acceptable length. We could do some click-to-expand submenus, but some would be bothered by the extra clicks there.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:06 PM on June 6, 2011

On mobile profile pages, this came up a couple months ago and the mobile alternative (making everything one column) wasn't as good as living with the current design on a smaller page. The problem is that people know where things are in the current design and they don't necessarily want to learn a new layout that fits better on a small screen. Maybe we could revisit that.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:12 PM on June 6, 2011

Ye gods you lot are quick. I realize the menu is a little long; that's why I was hoping to stow "my" link(s) out of the way. But I defer to your judgement if you think another would reduce menu usability too much. I guess it's bookmark time. Thanks for your responses!
posted by Songdog at 2:17 PM on June 6, 2011

All I hope is that you don't disable your account if things don't go your way. OK? No more of that shit please.
posted by Elmore at 3:09 PM on June 6, 2011

What? Well! I never!
{cuts off hand, disables own account}
posted by kaibutsu at 3:34 PM on June 6, 2011

kaibutsu: "{cuts off hand, disables own account}"

really? Really?
posted by boo_radley at 4:04 PM on June 6, 2011

Admins: is there any sort of public list of the planned changes or improvements for the site?
posted by oxford blue at 5:15 PM on June 6, 2011

Nope. We don't even really have a backroom punch list. to be honest. There's a wiki page for things that we've already said we won't do, but usually we're either working on something right now, or it's pretty back burnered. The one exceprion is the There Is Help indicator thingie for the user pages which is on my To Do list, but I got suddenly busy.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:24 PM on June 6, 2011

My Little Pony
posted by Favorites Pony at 7:05 PM on June 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

How about making the [+] button an easier target on mobile browsers?
posted by schmod at 9:55 PM on June 6, 2011

We've played around with several different ways of arranging the flagging and favorites links in the mobile version—here was one incarnation. We haven't found something that makes it significantly easier to use without giving too much emphasis to those controls. We don't want to hurt the reading experience, even if that means the favoriting experience is less than stellar.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:29 PM on June 6, 2011

I'm glad you didn't introduce those buttons. Very glad.
posted by oxford blue at 11:04 PM on June 6, 2011

I think it's tough to fit everything everyone may want on the mobile menu. I've wanted to have a "sidebar" view for a long time.

I'd like a little "mobile menu" section added to my profile with a list that I could select or deselect for viewing as menu items in the mobile skin. For example I don't need "mefi mail" there, I don't use it very much at all. So I'd deselect that, and add "favorites" instead.
posted by disclaimer at 5:48 AM on June 7, 2011

I think that's the gap that bookmarks fill, disclaimer. A custom menu would basically be bookmarks onscreen. It'd save you a click, maybe two. I'm not sure that's worth the overhead involved.

You can bookmark the sideblog and contact activity. Those would give you the sidebar info.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:50 AM on June 7, 2011

Ok, thanks.
posted by disclaimer at 6:07 PM on June 7, 2011