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The other night I experimented a little bit with the HN API and with a conversation-tree interface.
While I enjoy reading comments on HN and Reddit, there are a few things I don’t like about the current visualizations, where every new level of comments is slightly indented compared to its parent:
- If you want to read the conversation where every item is the top rated reply, you have to read diagonally, going down and right. This doesn’t seem natural (though it feels natural now since I trained on that).
- Given an item, if you want to read the next top rated item on the same level, you have to scroll past all of the subtree of the current element. On reddit you can just close the current item using [–], but on HN there is no such option.
I tried to make an experiment with an interface where comments at the same level are at the same height in the page, but only one path to the leaf (one thread) is shown and the remaining tree is outside the viewport. For every item, it’s possible to visualize one of its siblings and its thread sliding in the whole subtree (actually only a path to a leaf).
If the description was not clear, you can find the running example here: http://hntree.ml
I tried to use it for a few days on mobile, and it seems usable.
Since it seems like a pretty natural way of visualizing tree-like conversations, does anyone know if a similar visualization is used anywhere else? Do you find it easier/harder to follow a conversation with this UI compared to the standard one?