I’m wondering if there are other worthwhile personalization features that could be added to the list overview page? For example, I’ve added personalized groups of discussions (bookmarked discussions, discussion you’ve posted to), which contrasts with the general groups of discussions (most recent discussions, most active discussions, etc.). Could we do something similar with the section for list stats? Right now, there’s only general list stats – overall posting frequencies and a leader board of the top posters. Would it be meaningful to add personalized stats? Some ideas I had for this might be:

  • timestamp of when you subscribed to the list
  • timestamp of the last message you posted to that list
  • number of messages you’ve posted to the list
  • number of people who’ve bookmarked/following your discussion/posts
  • average votes for the posts you’ve contributed for that list

What do you think – would you be interested in seeing these personalized list stats? What other personal list stats might be helpful and/or meaningful to add?

Speaking of list stats, I’m also wondering how useful the general stats are, as they are currently designed. Specifically, the chart showing the posting frequency for the last 30 days is definitely informative in that it shows short-term trends. For example, perhaps a big milestone/release is coming up, so you’ll see a big spike in the chart because more people are posting messages. However, long-term trends are not really evident in the current design.

Given that, I’m wondering whether if it would be meaningful to add details like:

  • timestamp of when the list started – is this a relatively new list or one of the older, more established lists?
  • how representative is the chart – by adding a small visual cue (perhaps an up/down arrow), we could indicate whether the posting frequency in the last 30 days is higher/the same/lower than the average posting frequency across the list’s entire lifetime
  • how recent is the activity from the folks on the leader board – is the poster someone who’s still actively posting, or from someone who used to post a lot but is no longer around? We could add a simple timestamp of their last activity to provide a cue for this type of information
  • total number of subscribers to the list – this could be helpful in indicating how popular the list to others
  • categories aren’t implemented yet, but the interface does have a section for listing discussions by category – would it perhaps be more meaningful to have a simple infographic (like a pie chart) in lieu of a listing by category, which gives an overview of what kinds of labels are used in this list? The downside to this idea is that it would be easy to skew the data. For example, if only 1% of the threads in the list are labeled and the entire 1% are put into the flame category, then the pie chart would show a category distribution that makes the list look like it contains an overwhelming number of flame messages.

What do you think – would adding these details be helpful? Are there other list stats that you’d be interested in having on the list overview page?

This article has 1 comments

  1. Adam Williamson Reply

    Personally I don’t think I’d find any of those useful. I’m kind of sceptical about junk data in general: just because we have data and it’s easy to manipulate and display various views on it doesn’t make any of those views particularly useful for anything in particular. But just a personal opinion.

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