We’re trying out a slightly different way of showing the goal descriptions on the dashboard; namely, if there’s a description to show, it now appears under the goalname. The upside is that the goalname now links to the goal instead of either toggling to the goal description or being a no-op, which was annoying a lot of people.
The downside is that if most of your goals have descriptions, there’s now a bunch more text on your dashboard and it maybe looks uglier.
Starting this thread to collect feedback in either direction on the change!
Apparently I’d got used to the the ALLCAPS display of my goal names, though I was still sometimes frustrated by the toggling when I wanted to get to the goal page and forgot that that was a thing.
not sure that lowercase is an improvement on ALLCAPS
pretty sure that the underlining is visually cluttery, rather than value-adding
the underline implies a smaller click target than is actually the case
plus we’ve violated one of the rules of underlined links, i.e. meaningful colour
losing the single-line-per-goal seems like a bad thing
seems harder to scan my list of goals (in deadline order) to find the one I want
Like a lot of changes, I’ll probably get used to it. Glad to see that we’re experimenting, and the only way to test things like this is to experience it on our own goals.
Ah yeah the all-caps change got added here as well. This was based on people feeling pretty strongly (and vocally expressing said feelings) that they chose the goalnames with a specific capitalization scheme and that by displaying them in all caps we were losing that bit of information, which seems like a legitimate point.
So it’s my own fault that all of mine appear as lowercase…
Could be a hangover from my expectation that the goalname is just the URL slug. Happily, the API seems to be case-insensitive, so I can alter the display without screwing up my scripts and integrations.
I’m not loving this change, and at first, I thought it was some sort of glitch. Almost like it was displaying backup text because the correct text wasn’t loading.
I think one possible large improvement could be putting the description above the slug, to give that more prominence, and possibly de-emphasizing the slug where a description is present. Here are two tweaked versions I personally think would look better:
In this one, I reverse their positions and reduced the font size of the slug link from 16px to 14px. This de-emphasizes the slug and emphasizes the goal title, while still being clear that the slug is the link. This slug formatting could also be applied to goals without descriptions and wouldn’t look bad.
In this version, I also changed the color of the slug from #3b3b3b to #888888. This gives it more of a “linky” feel, while emphasizing the description instead of the slug. On goals without descriptions, you could leave the color as #3b3b3b to show that the slug is both the link and the description of the goal.
I’m personally not a fan - looks pretty cluttered to me. I also thought it was some kind of loading glitch. That said, I’m sure I’d adapt over time (or just delete my redundant descriptions).
I’m the opposite — I greatly prefer the lowercase.
That said, most of my descriptions are too long for the small width provided. They’re truncated so much that most of them aren’t helpful at all in this context, so I find seeing them in this way more frustrating than anything.
Of my 13 goals with descriptions, only 5 are short enough to be fully visible. Here’s what I’m seeing…
Rather than abandon the idea, I suggest allowing the goal description to span multiple columns, so more of it is visible. This would, indeed, be very useful for me.
Awesome! Just what I need from dashboard. However, not intuitive at all. (For people searching the forum: in dashboard, to switch / toggle between total goal amount needed and bare minimun remaining just click on them).
I thing figuring that out can be simplified. Maybe this piece of settings can be duplicated in goal’s “settings” tab (these are per-goal settings after all), somewhere near the “graph settings” section - with a note that these things can be changed directly from dashboard by clicking.
Also, element should notify that it’s interactive and to what extent, at least on hover. For example, on hover add “<” and “>” before and after element or something.
Maybe second part has already been done and there’s just something wrong with my CSS - I don’t have fancy hexagons like @mattepp has. Screenshot just in case:
Reminder that we’re still losing case, ie, destructively lowercasing users’ goalnames. I think goalnames should be case-insensitive but we should remember the way the user typed it and always display it that way. Except maybe in the URL?
Big for mocking this up, @nickanderegg! My aesthetic opinion is the opposite – we want the goalname to be what’s emphasized and the description is where you can add optional auxiliary info. Maybe that’s more than just my aesthetic opinion – that choice is currently pretty deeply embedded into the design of the website, the phone apps, the bots (email, sms, Slack), etc etc. I do appreciate the opposite view but it’s way easier said than done at this point so, for now, we’re doubling down on goalnames as the central/dominant identifier. (I’m still not thrilled with how this looks though, and agree with @mattepp that we should show more of the description, however much we emphasize it.)
PS: And @daerdemandt is right that toggling (if we want it at all!) needs more affordance, as UX people say. Thanks, everyone! Super helpful thread here!
I disagree with this bit, just because I made the mockup by changing the page’s CSS
Other than that, I think the current iteration of the formatting could use some improvement, but it is much better than original. Having one of the two names de-emphasized (regardless of which one that is) is a definite improvement.
Oh, right, I don’t mean technically with the CSS, just that UX-wise we need the user to primarily identify the goal by the short goalname and use the description for auxiliary info about the goal. This is super fraught because in the past we conflated those, so there are a lot of people using what’s now the description field as primary goal identifier. Long story!
for mocking this up, 