User Experience Design for Comments

  Categorized under: Web-Design-Articles

Here’s a short list of items your next user experience design for comments should contain in order of priority. This will allow for sites to capture more relative analytics per site without needing to go through Google Analytics, even though you could use their transparent pixel capturing to send data to them as well per post.

So let’s start the list:

1. First Name, Last Name, Thumbnail (readers love icons)
2. Link to a users site
3. Global Location
4. Date commented.
5. Comments, delimited to 566 characters which is about 2 paragraphs
6. An Expand button for comments so websites can capture using AJAX or JQuery how often user’s are interacting or reading comments but not posting.
7. Nested comments for responses, and even chained comments. Users love to comment on one another.
7. A Sharing or Recommend Facebook button or text
8. Filtering mechanism that compute Most Shared, Most Commented and Latest posts.

Here’s some important aspects to remember for commenting. I’m going to use the New York Times as my example due their popularity and level of commenting. The Times has the ability to sort or just show top most shared comments. But they are missing some simple elements. The UI for Esquire’s online edition already does some the nesting, though they don’t have the sorting I’d like.

— Zeus ::)
Jan 13, 2012