Comment by Rodeoclash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rodeoclash | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure if this is in the spirit of the thread but I've been working on a way to allow reviews of gameplay in video games. In short, you upload a video of you playing the game and someone who's an expert can review it.

I currently have a UI with the comments down the side of the screen which looks like this:

https://www.volt.school/videos/c980297a-417b-416f-947b-58a70...

This is good because you can easily: - See all the comments - Navigate between them - See replies etc.

However it has a huge problem with you trying to balance watching the video with reading the comments.

I also have an alternative UI I've been working on which only shows one comment at a time:

https://www.volt.school/videos-v2/c980297a-417b-416f-947b-58...

However the downsides of this is that you can't see all the comments at once. I'm not a UI/UX designer AT ALL so I'd really appreciate some pointers around how to think about making this better! The original post mentions "close to solving", I think I am pretty close but it's still not quite right and while I'm not out of ideas yet, I'd appreciate feedback if solving this is obvious to someone else.

How about showing the comments directly on the video, at a specific time, and a specific place.

Something like Soundcloud comments but for video.

Asian video platforms used to do that. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOMMQmYwd4I

It's totally crazy but can be made much more coherent. Would be useful to have comments at a specific time and place on the screen just for very accurate pointers/comments.

So maybe the problem with showing all the comments at once is that there are too many, and when showing one at a time they are not shown for long enough.

How about breaking the play into chapters/zones/rooms/segments (whatever makes sense for the game) then showing all the comments for that segment. Once the segment ends, there would be a replay button if they missed anything on the first play while reading comments, and a next segment button to carry on.

Interesting time spans could be marked for slow motion, boring bits played at double time.

There would be high level navigation between segments with thumbnails and comment counts. Buttons to skip between “pivotal moments”, maybe with voting to highlight them.

The default should be to show one comment at a time, because that's convenient and quick to get into, but also with an option (maybe just a scroll down) to view all comments. One, that helps the reviewer get an overall idea of what kind of things the submitter is looking for, if they want that, and two, some submitters are inevitably gonna screw up, posting at the wrong times or asking overall summary questions that should be asked at the end right at the beginning or somesuch. So an All Questions button or similar should be there as an escape hatch, but not the primary UI.

I find that my normal model for reading comments on videos across platforms is to not read them much of the time, but if it's a really interesting video go look at the comments and it's ok if the video is for example, fully minimized or off screen etc while I read them.

I don't know how normal my use is though or if that's at all helpful.

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