Site navigation

Navigation is pretty intuitive and easy, IMO. A smartphone/iPad/iPhone App would be nice, but not essential.

I find the interface generally easy to use and logical. I went through it briefly tonight and following are a few areas that could be more convenient:

- It takes a lot of scrolling on the home page to get to those "lists" that I'm interested in. I know you want maximum exposure for all work on the site, but I rarely stop to read an essay or poem. My interest is in new books/chapters and new work from my connections. If there were some way to minimize the others (varies by user), that would be a breath of fresh air. It's even worse on my smartphone, since I have to swipe my way close to the bottom to get at my groups' forum posts.
- The search icon on main screen (the magnifying glass) should include the ability to do a quick search in all forum posts (in addition to search for writer and search for works). That feature is currently too well hidden.
- The detailed search deserves to be more visible, too. That thing is a gem. I think it would eliminate some of the gripes about forum structure if you can easily find an old post by keywords. The detailed search could use tweaking as well. The list of groups to search should be sorted alphabetically and there should be a control that selects "all of my groups" in the list with one click.
- Ideally, it would be nice if the quick search and detailed search could treat the words in the search field as individual keywords, rather than treating the whole field as a single string. Sometimes you can remember a few keywords of an old post, but not the exact string. If someone wants a single string, they can put them in quotes.
- My Reviews screen should default to Inline Received instead of Regular Received. I think most would agree.

Hope this helps.
Dirk

Ideally, REGEX or even approximate word-matching (so that 'abolitionist' also matches 'abolitionism' (but not 'abiogenicist')).  That latter requires deep and broad knowledge of the English lexicon and is probably best left to Google.  But REGEX in its many variations is A Solved Problem.  The only problems are which variant to use and whether to fold case.  (The answer to the latter is Probably Yes.)

Been a while since I used (n)awk.

I find navigation all right. Only I would change the rule of connecting with people. I mean notify your intentions window. I think it is not really necessary. Otherwise, it works well.

I’d like to see you retool the navigation mainly in the portfolio section. I realize some of the choices made were because you were tailoring the site to be viewed on several platform types, but as is, it’s highly click laden, backwards unreliable and often redundant. 

1)    For instance, want to edit something? Click portfolio>scroll the list >click the desired title >choose the desired action>scroll a second list >choose the dropdown action—success at last!
And if you make a mistake on that edit, clicking the edit function from WITHIN the view pane doesn’t accelerate the process (as one would reasonably assume), it takes you back out to the master edit pane which forces you to click through all the above navigation again.
Also, because of the compartmentalizing of all the available actions, each time you want to change something on a piece of work, you have to deal with navigating in and out of each subcategory via the master edit pane.

I’d like to see this entire process streamlined for efficiency.

2)    Another thing, as others have mentioned, is I’d also like to see review types combined. It’s cumbersome and click laden to have to go through two separate lists. Also, the Filter feature doesn’t work if you wish to combine reviews: I. E. If I want ALL reviews on chapter 1 of X project, I can’t unless I leave the review section and go into VIEW mode on X project (where the styled reviews are clumped).

3)    The filter option of the review section also has navigation bugs. For instance, if I am in a filtered review, I cannot use the back navigation on my browser to choose another review from the filtered list because doing so kicks you off the site entirely.

What I’d like to see when you navigate into the review section is either a drop down of all your works to choose from, or book covers of all your reviewed work so you can simply choose the work and see all reviews according to chapter.

4)    Would still love to see you offer a static forum style for group forums. For all the reasons we’ve discussed publically and privately, but also because it would do away with the need for moderators to keep bumping important threads.

5)    I would love get customizable features on my account homepage. It’s not a huge deal to keep having to scroll past stuff on a daily basis, but it would be nice to have a choice of what predominately populates my page—along with drop down choices so I can see that other stuff when desired.

One of the most click-intensive features is the pop-up text boxes when doing an inline review. It would be great if the cursor was inside the box without the extra click.

Yeah, that nit becomes a burr under the butt put in the chair preparatory to writing or reviewing.