rotane on DeviantArthttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/https://www.deviantart.com/rotane/art/Suggestion-Activity-Feed-page-mockup-490233444rotane

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Suggestion: Activity Feed page mockup

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The newly released Watch Feed poses 2 large problems:
1. Everything is too large.
2. The Activity widget on our profile pages is way too large.
… you see where i'm going with this.

And also:
3. There is currently no way to access our older status posts.


With this out of the way, i have a solution/suggestion: Let's remove the widget from our main profile page and move it to a new page, tentatively called the Activity Feed. As you can see in the screenshot, it gets its own tab on your profile. Now, this isn't meant to be a substitution to the old Activity page, but i did drew some inspiration from it.

Also, while this is a mockup for an entirely new page, i do believe that at least some of the details here can (and should, in my opinion) be incorporated into the Watch Feed, too. And yes, while it does look quite similar to the current Watch Feed at a quick glance, there are a ton of little details that are different. This was a conscious decision on my part; i didn't want to re-invent the wheel, only iterate on the current thing. 


Let's run you through it:

Size
Everything is at a more reasonable size – the font of the status posts in particular. Also gone are the full view deviations. Why? Because i don't want to be limited to just one item per screen while i'm scrolling the feed.

Width
A max-width of about 900px ensures good readability. (800px, possibly even less, would be even better, but with a slightly larger font than usual, that's okay.) The wider the boxes get, the longer the lines, the harder it gets to read. It's as simple as that.

Colour
Everything you see is slightly darker and softer than the current Watch Feed, but i believe the Watch Feed is too bright and harsh in many places – a few parts are even plain white. To me this doesn't fit the identity of deviantART. Likewise, no blue-ish links, no bolding of links, and a more subtle external link indicator.
Also, the comment area is broken apart from the main post area by a hairline and is further distinguished by a slightly darker background colour. This is to better separate content from comments.

Comments
Comments are hidden by default, you'll only see a link like "View 2 comments" below a post. Once you click it, all the comments expand inline, without opening a new page. "HA!", i can hear you say, "but what if there are hundreds of comments?" Fair point, and in this case said link would indeed open a new page.

Favourites / Collections
I don't like it that i can't click on a thumb; instead i'm brought to a Collection where i need to go hunt for that deviation again. I think this is unnecessarily cumbersome – we do have a link to the Collection right there anyway.

Submitting a deviation / Writing a journal
While it's cool that we can read a whole journal and see the full view of a deviation right on the Feed page, i also think it takes up too much space. I think a large thumb is enough, and the new Today page has some nice designs as to how a teaser of journals can look.

The navbar
And finally, because it's in the screenshot, at the very top, deviantNAV. While i believe that the new navbar looks better than the old, it could still benefit from a few tweaks. You can read all about it here: About deviantNAV

What is missing?
I'm not sure i like the idea of sharing and re-sharing every piece of content too much. Because of this, i've left it the way it is and only added one shared post near the bottom as an example. Also, i'm not too happy with the way a submitted journal or deviation appear in the feed; i might have to think about that some more. 


Well, that's the gist of it. Feel free to comment!

Oh, and here is the same suggestion, distractions-free, without annotations:
Suggestion: Activity Feed page mockup clean by rotane


Thanks ginkgografix for "lending" me her avatar.
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Comments62
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Endorell-Taelos's avatar
I can't believe I just saw this.. If the Activity Feed was not a widget but a page like the journal page, I'd probably use it. :XD: