Make Topic Title More Important & and H1

[djensen47]

First, the title of the page, must must must be an H1. This is crucial for SEO.

Second, by putting the title next to the name of the poster, I feel like it gets lost. Going left to right, the most important thing is my headshot but it should be the title. Here are some ideas:

[a_5mith]

@djensen47 Agree with H1, disagree with moving it. What about an hr line underneath it, drop the padding-bottom back down to 0 from 5px. then drop the H1 font-size to whatever h3 is currently set to, something like this. Size isn't important after all.

[julian]

Yeah, I like the line under the title. visually separates the title and avatar from the post body.

[a_5mith]

@julian I've done a PR for that, unfortunately I can't find where the CSS is defined, so I'm thinking it's in Vanilla, I'm also not sure if the padding is needed for anything else.

But basically

.topic .posts li[data-index="0"] .topic-title {
line-height: 1.5em;
margin: 0 0 -5px;
overflow: hidden;
padding: 0 0 5px;
width: auto;
}

becomes

.topic .posts li[data-index="0"] .topic-title {
line-height: 1.5em;
margin: 0 0 -5px;
overflow: hidden;
padding: 0px;
width: auto;
}

[djensen47]

@a_5mith The reasons for moving it:

• Inline title is very similar to the old way of doing forums.
• It is easily lost on the page. Frequently on this forum I've ended up on a page scanning for a title.
• There are several example of forum setting where this is used:
  • Stackoverflow
  • Discourse (the competition got it right)
  • Vanilla Forums (yup the other competitor got it right too)
  • Quora – less like the above of the post but the title is clearly marked separate from the content.

Simply put, the title is the important thing on the page. It describes clearly and succinctly what the page is about. My avatar does not describe my post and my post does not describe my post (because it is the post). If people can't figure out what's going on, they will just get frustrated and leave.

[djensen47]

You think your should consider a usability study on this matter.

[a_5mith]

@djensen47 I don't want to disagree with you, but I do. I've done a lot of usability testing in my time for eCommerce businesses all over the world.

The title is in the same place on every post. It is a uniformed approach, the simple answer here is "it's to the right of your avatar in the first post, in bold, bigger than everything else". If you've scrolled down, then it's at the top of the page next to the nav (that's for another topic)

There are plenty of ways to know what topic you're in, no matter what portion of the page you're on. Unless you use the F11 feature in Firefox to hide your taskbar when you don't use it.

BUT, I'm a man of compromise here, so I would like to approach this from another suggestion.

Something like this perhaps, but with more time spent on the padding and the margins. I was going to center it just to see if I could spark more controversy, but I'm a professional. And professionals always please.

[A Former User]

This strong statement of right and wrong is curious. My test users are fine with the current title and are not leaving out of frustration. And they like the layout better than Vanilla or Discourse.

Should I tell them to read more UX studies?

[psychobunny]

Aesthetics for me is subjective, and UX can be as well. Once we get 0.5x out of the way I hope to release a bunch more themes that are completely different from each other, and potential forum admins will hopefully be able to choose whatever they think will suit their needs. Or even mix and match (which is why we've focused a lot on widgets and plugins, for example).

Anyways, I'll sit on the fence on this one since I have a few other things on my plate in the next few weeks, but I'll definitely consider these points in the next theme

[djensen47]

@a_5mith For what it's worth, I really like your suggestion, a lot. +100.