Just thinking out loud here. A lot of user requests revolve around adding new ways to configure the app. This is great but each new configuration tends to add one or more settings to the settings menu. This growing list of settings has me worried about setting page organization. I might try to tackle the problem in this release.
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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Summit
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First let's look at the top level settings categories.
At the highest level we have:
- Look & Feel: Settings that have to do with something that is directly interactable by the user. Eg. settings for a particular screen in the app.
- Account: Settings that have to do with a particular account.
- Systems: Settings that can alter the app that will indirectly affect the user. Eg. hidden post management and cache management.
.
I think these 3 categories make sense but I think currently the Systems category is also treated as a Misc category. Eg. things like about and a link to the community doesn't really fit in this category. It might be better to break these out into it's own category.
One of the biggest annoyances I have personally with settings is with this split of settings for the post feed and the post screen.
We have four setting screens for them:
- Post list
- Comment list
- Post appearance
- Post and comment appearance
In my opinion this is really confusing and also causes some organization problems. In reality there are only two screens served by these 4 setting pages. We have the Post Feed which is the main screen of the app; where a list of post is presented. And the post screen which displays the main post and then comments for that post.
The main reason why this was split into 4 setting screens is because the appearance setting screens show a preview of the UI and so I wanted all settings on these screens to change something UI related that can be immediately seen in the preview. I thought this would be a cool way to show changes. My feelings here hasn't changed.
The issue is that organization of the settings is confusing.
As an example, let's say I was a user who wanted to see if I could change the image of the posts to appear on the right side of the screen in the list layout for the post feed. Reading the settings, my eyes would immediately jump to the Post list settings page. This page states it has settings pertaining to the post list which sounds like it show hold the setting I'm looking for but it doesn't. Instead this setting is actually in Post appearance.
So my current idea is to reduce these four setting pages into two pages:
- Posts feed.
- Post & comments.
Then featured prominently at the top of these two settings screen will be a button that will open their respective appearance customizations.
This will hopefully solve a few problems:
- Less confusing top level menu options.
- More intuitive settings organization.
Hi, I found a small bug. I'll mention it here since it's related to the settings page, which you are working on for this update.
If I tap on Settings -> Misc -> Customize post quick actions, all the other options on the same page are deactivated.
I can't reproduce this myself. Could you clarify or provide a screenshot? I tried the following:
- Go to Misc settings.
- Enabled and disabled some settings.
- Tap customize quick post actions.
- Tap back.
- Verified that the settings are still what they were.
- Verified I can still toggle them on/off.
Of course! I should've included a video from the beginning, sorry.
I can't reproduce this at all. I'm going to move this setting to a different screen in the next release. I'm not sure that will fix the issue but without a reproduction on my end it's difficult for me to fix the issue. I've been trying for the past hour to replicate this on any of the settings screens and I cannot. If you can provide any other details let me know.
Just as I posted this I tested this on an emulator instead of real devices and it reproduced on the emulator. Not sure why that is but I should be able to look for a fix now.