Design Decisions: Campfire transcript browser redesign Feb 27 2007
42 comments Latest by Jolin Tsai
Last week we pushed a major change to the Campfire transcript browser. The change was made for a variety of reasons – some of which I’ll detail below – but mostly in response to the flaws in our original “wouldn’t it be cool if…” design. We confused enthusiasm with priority.
Here’s what the transcript browser looked like before last week’s change.
I’ll take you through the original idea behind the design and then the reality of experience with a year under our belts.
1. We thought it would be great if you could click a room name to filter the transcripts by room so we built that functionality into the first column. Reality: Most people just use one or two rooms for everything. We kept filtering in the new design, but we de-emphasized it since it’s not that important.
2. We thought it would be really useful to be able to not only filter by room, but also filter by person. Just show me the chats that Jamis Buck was involved with. Reality: Theoretically useful, but rarely used. The overhead to build this list and deal with per-person filtering was not worth the cost – not by a longshot.
3. We thought that listing every single day since you signed up would be a useful way to get at past transcripts. Reality: The most common scenario is wanting to jump back to a recent chat that happened sometime in the past few weeks. Remembering which day something happened from 8 months ago is less likely than just searching for some keywords.
4. We thought a single narrow column to display transcripts, people in those chats, and files uploaded on those days would be enough space. Reality: A single active room could take up 10” of vertical space or more. A tall, narrow column is not the ideal layout for browsing through past chats.
5. We thought the old transcript browser would be fast. Reality: The old transcript browser was embarrassingly slow. The design demanded it pull too much complex data too often. It was fine for your first two weeks of using Campfire, but the slowdown was exponential the more you used it. Not good.
We realized that the transcripts were the most important things on the screen – not the navigation to get to them. Just give me the transcripts!
So we redesigned it keeping “it’s the transcripts, stupid” in mind.
Here’s what we did.
1. We went for a more blog-like format. The day of the chat is like the title of a post – big, bold, linked up. We also made sure the name of the day was as prominent as the date. “Wednesday” is easier to relate to than “The 14th.”
2. Each transcript gets the full width – you can now see four or five or six transcripts in the space that the old layout would use for one.
3. We ran the files in a 4 column grid to save space. We still have some work to do when really long file names wrap, but it was a great first step.
4. We made “Delete transcript” explicit instead of using a small trash can icon. “How do I delete a transcript?” was a popular support request.
5. We moved the room filter to a pulldown on the right side of the screen. It’s useful if you have a lot of rooms, but otherwise it’s out of your way. And if you only have one room you don’t see it at all.
6. We added pagination. We show 14 days of transcripts per screen.
7. And finally, and by far the most important thing we did, we made search nearly 100x faster. Search was another weak spot of Campfire. Really active accounts would have to wait 10+ seconds for a single result. Now it happens in less than a second. We’ll be carrying this technology over into our other products this year as well. We finally have a fast search solution that we’re happy with.
Yes, the new design isn’t as visually pleasing as the old design, but it’s significantly faster, more useful, makes much better use of screen space, and gets the job done better. The more you get used to the new layout the more you appreciate why it looks and works the way it does.
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42 comments so far
Raymond Brigleb 27 Feb 07
Makes sense. I noticed the work-in-progress a couple days ago, but I didn’t notice the per-room filtering. This design makes a lot of sense now that I’ve gotten more used to it. Thanks for sharing your reasoning!
z 27 Feb 07
kudos on so many levels!
Tim 27 Feb 07
With regards to software, “faster is better™” ... though, I’ll admit that I find the current design more distracting and less intuitive than the previous design.
Matt Johnson 27 Feb 07
Indeed, a beautiful redesign, I’m using campfire as we speak, and it looks great. Thanks!
Steven van Wel 27 Feb 07
Great stuff! thanks guys.
Chris Busse 27 Feb 07
Heh, I can’t remember which day something happened in a chat a few days ago, much less a few weeks ago. Search is all that matters to me and its great to hear that it’s been sped up.
What I would like to see in the future is some sort of “file purge”. As far as I can tell my choices are to delete a transcript or delete files one by one. What I’d really like to do is either have a link to “Delete files from this Transcript” or “Delete all files before (date).” Preserve what was said, but give me back the file space in an easy way.
Douglas Shearer 27 Feb 07
I have to say the redesign was a bit of a shock, and I instantly cried out for the old version. After using it for a week or so, I have to say I am with the speed, and filtering by person wasn’t that useful anyway.
So what’s your search secret? MySQL indexes, Ferret, or something different?
Keep up the good work guys.
Onigiri 27 Feb 07
May you give us more info about your new search solution?
thanks and kudos for the rewriting!
mike 27 Feb 07
Indeed, a beautiful redesign, I’m using campfire as we speak, and it looks great. Thanks!
Bill 27 Feb 07
It really does my heart good to hear how you improved a feature by removing “flexibility.” I can just imagine how this would have turned out at my job: we would have somehow “done both” in the name of “keeping it flexible.” Man I am growing to hate those three words.
John Wesley 27 Feb 07
I appreciate the design insights. Interesting what changes once you really start using something.
Also, I read through ‘Getting Real’. Very inspiring. I’d love to work with people who think like that.
d49 27 Feb 07
I always thought my data was safe with 37s and now I find out they’re talking to the CIA almost everyday.
Thijs van der Vossen 27 Feb 07
This is better. The first one had ‘Designers Live Here’ written all over it. ;)
ben 27 Feb 07
I preferred the old design.
JF 27 Feb 07
now I find out they’re talking to the CIA almost everyday.
Ha! CIA is an internal reporting bot that lets us know if we broke or fixed something when we commit a change.
Matthew Scholtz 27 Feb 07
Seems like good insights into good decisions to me. Thanks for sharing.
Blake 27 Feb 07
Wow, 3 out of the 4 days viewable in the photo – the bot reported something was broken.
Ouch !
Kasra 27 Feb 07
A nice visual upgrade; it looks a lot better now.
I’m kind of torn between having pagination or not (generally speaking). I mean, if the user is looking for a list of items, why only show 14 and not every single item and let them scroll through it. What do you guys think?
JF 27 Feb 07
Kasra, pagination is required for performance. Displaying 14 days of data is performance friendly. Displaying 365 days of data is not.
WT 27 Feb 07
I, for one, also would like to hear more details about the search improvement. What kind of search technology are you using with the new design?
amix 27 Feb 07
Really nice redesign!
This redesign also shows that search-by-navigation is pretty much useless when dealing with large amounts of data.
Ryan 27 Feb 07
Great job—very nice redesign.
Warren Henning 28 Feb 07
I also wonder about the technology side of things involved in speeding up the search. Could David/Jamis/someone fill us in?
Don Porter 28 Feb 07
Well thought through redesign; search is fast and extraordinarily useful in our law practice when communicating amongst staff on a variety of cases. When first viewed it is not as pretty, but one quickly sees the great improvement in speed and utility—the beauty is in its function and simplicity.
John Nunemaker 28 Feb 07
Out of curiousity, what is that solution? Full text db? Ferret? Something else?
Jimmy 28 Feb 07
Don’t like it, preferred the old design. I preferred the flexibility of the old features. New design doesnt allow me to search by person. It only searches the contents of the transcript, which doesnt include the users name. Yesterday, I was looking for a chat from a few weeks ago, couldn’t remember the date. I could only remember the person I was chatting with. But when I searched by keyword, in the case the person’s name = no matches. So I had to scroll thru day by day, until I found the chat, which occurred on Feb 5th. Thanks for taking features away = unhappy customer.
Matt Hansen 28 Feb 07
Nice, intuitive redesign.
+1 for more details on the search improvements.
JF 28 Feb 07
For those interested in our search solution, we’ll be addressing it detail in a future post.
James Dowens 28 Feb 07
I’m not a regular Campfire user so I’m not really qualified to comment on whether or not it I think it’s an improvement.
I do love the methodology behind the redesign though, it seems to honour almost all of John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity which in my book is a very good thing.
I am interested in how you discovered that your original thoughts were ‘wrong’. Was it your own experience, user feedback or did you perform real-world user testing?
dandan 28 Feb 07
Yes, the new design isn’t as visually pleasing as the old design …
I like the new design more – really works for me in terms of finding the information.
Christian Romney 28 Feb 07
Perhaps just as interesting as your search solution is your pagination solution. We’ve all read a million times that the pagination code that ships with Rails is one of the, um, least attractive spots. I’m curious, are you indeed using the default pagination stuff or did you write something ripe for extraction back into Rails?
MS 28 Feb 07
Pagination or not? Have a look at humanized’s reader to see how this could be implemented (scroll down the page to see it).
Nathaniel 28 Feb 07
I love Design Decisions.
Ryan Bergeman 28 Feb 07
Nice job!
Time to update the tour screenshot. :)
Mimo 28 Feb 07
I would like to ask you if it would be possible to delete the files in one klick. For example: Delete 20 oldest files. I am not a paying user but i think this could be also helpfull for paying ones. Campfire is not used as an archive but as a room to talk about things. Once you talked about them you do not need them anymore.
floyd 28 Feb 07
If I can make a suggestion:
There is no good place to manage all your files in campfire. The list on the sidebar is handy, but it comes with a deceitful link which claims to take you to ‘all’ the files, but actually only takes you to the transcript page. i think this violates the basic principle of never lie to your user.
Since campire is more about temporary file sharing, I would just have a user-modifiable setting that automatically deletes older files.
John Rochford 28 Feb 07
Give us a hint on the search solution. Is it ferret?
JF 28 Feb 07
Flloyd, you’re right. Campfire can be better at file management (namely deleting old ones to free up space). It’s something we will address in time.
Steve 28 Feb 07
^ Good to hear. My biggest gripe is that I can’t easily just delete gobs of old files without trashing the related transcripts. The file space fills up fast.
Travis Schmeisser 28 Feb 07
Good solution! I love the “What We Thought” vs. “Reality” split.
artemskiy 03 Mar 07
previous was better, and filtering by people was SO useful!!
Jolin Tsai 03 Mar 07
The new search function doesn’t support Chinese. The old search function works well with Chinese character.
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