The old m-dot version has a lot of super pale grey that is hard to read even if you have excellent vision, but completely unreadable for some.
Currently, if you come to Daily Kos on a mobile device, you get a version we colloquially call m-dot. It’s a separate, simplified presentation of Daily Kos made in the era where phones were limited in power and where web browsers had to be told what to do pixel by pixel painstakingly and differently on each device if you wanted anything other than plain text. Our m-dot presents the content simply, at the expense of embeds in comments or a full-fledged comment editor, and hides away features like user pages or groups or even the story editor.
This is the old world way of doing things, to have a separate presentation. New web browsers are much smarter, and will let us create a single page that knows what to do based on your screen width and device type with much less work from us. Having a single code base lets us bring more functionality to everyone with less work. And it is helpful for accessibility too, so that people who experience the web with enlarged type or narrow screens aren’t hobbled by our poor design choices or lack of imagination.
The new version for mobile gets the same comments and comment editor as the desktop crew. It gets a font change, a cleaner look, and a little more clarity around some functions. It gets access to tags and groups associated with a story. It can do proper embeds. Eventually, it will have all the same features of the full desktop version (though it doesn’t yet).
We’re almost ready to unveil this, and I need your help!
For this experiment, we’d like you to come to dailykosbeta.com with your mobile device, and have a look around. Your credentials should be the same as on Daily Kos (as they were a month ago say). Come read some stories, recommend some comments, write some comments. Nothing you do on Beta goes on the permanent record, so feel free to play.
If you don’t have a phone but you’re curious, this is the Safari way
If you come on a desktop or tablet, it should look the same as the regular site. If you want to be sneaky, many browsers have an option in their Developer Tools that will let you change to pretending you’re a phone.
I know! You like the old font. You like the obscure little star for recommends and the text-only comments. This version has also been used in the past as a workaround for people who wanted an extremely simple display for printing or who had very old and limited hardware.
How can I give my feedback effectively, elfling?
The new version will give you notifications of new comments, once you’ve started reading the comments (not until then though!). The new version still may show pictures of Trump unfortunately, which is why I didn’t dismiss the comment notification to create this screenshot.
Also yes, I love my absurdly tiny phone.
We will have a story on Daily Kos Beta that will be set up to receive your comments. We will also accept comments at the Help Desk, and there will be a link to a simple survey that lets us collect even more feedback.
Please remember that all comments will be read, and everyone who will be reading your feedback has worked hard on this release with the intent to make the site better for all our users. We want to hear about things we can do better, but understand that hostile, abusive comments are hard to share around the team. The most effective and useful comments:
- Are actionable
- Kind and constructive comments clearly describe a task you can’t do as well as before
- If your use is unusual, the comment includes the reason you use it that way (for example, maybe you collect stories for publishing to a group in a way we didn’t expect or accommodate).
- Assume we want to help you
We’ll reflect on every comment and tweak the pages as we are able to and as seems appropriate. The best way to give us this feedback if you’d like a change is to tell us about a use case — an activity that you’re trying to do — and why you’re not able to accomplish it as easily. These kinds of comments are the most successful at getting the changes you want and need. The old pages won’t be removed until the new ones seem to be doing the job well. A good example of effective, persuasive feedback:
When I want to recommend a comment, sometimes I accidentally tap the wrong spot with my finger, and do the wrong action. I’ve tried to be more careful about where I tap, but it keeps happening to me even when I’m paying close attention.
We want you to be able to do the things you want to do, and helping you do them is what makes our team happy. We can’t always do everything you want, but we do try our best. Critical comments can still be kind, and kind comments are more likely to be read directly by the whole team.
Change can be jarring, which is why we really want you to have some time to try it out and make suggestions before it interferes with your regular reading. For myself, I’m to the point where I actively prefer the new version even though it’s a hassle for me to do the developer dance to see it and I have to repeat the dance for each story.
Now, bring your phone to https://www.dailykosbeta.com and try the thing!
