Now you lost me | Hacker News Reader

Now you lost me

krista.cc

78 pointsmgronhol17 comments

I like the reasoning behind this and I really welcome the simplicity of giving feedback, but the way it is implemented here does not really make things clearer. The link makes me think I'll get a simplified summary of the paragraph, instantly. It's not clear that it sends an email to the writer.

Also, the writer will never know if a feedback-email comes from a genuinely confused reader or from someone like me who simply though 'what does this button do?'.

A solution would be to show a message after clicking the link, saying something like 'thank you for your feedback, we've send an email to the writer' together with a Cancel button.

I find feedback mechanisms that allow readers to react to individual parts of text to be useful, especially when the text is of a technical nature.

What I dislike about this particular implementation is the UI: You don't know what happens when you click the button until you have actually clicked it (the same problem has for example the 'kudos' widget on Svbtle[0]). Also the button is slightly obtrusive. Something more subtle with an explanation on hover or a confirmation dialog would IMO do a better job.

A good example of something similar is (the now obsolete) Django Book[1] where people can comment on any paragraph.

[0] e.g. http://500hats.com/late-bloomer/

[1] http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter05/

I really like that comment feature on Django Book. Are there any drop-in widgets that can accomplish that, or would it require some custom coding?

Edit: Found a few (for wordpress anyway):

http://digress.it/

https://fascinator.usq.edu.au/trac/wiki/Annotate

http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/

Edit 2: I take that back...these plugins attempt to restructure your blog into a book. So they really aren't the same =(

The same thing is done in the online version of Real World Haskell and is used fairly effectively by the readers to share solutions and clarify concepts.

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/getting-started.html

I believe this input was used in revising the book for the print version.

It is used effectively. Of course, programmers being programmers, it's also used to point out errors and typos. I've also read a bunch of good comments about choosing clearer wording for some parts.

If I was writing a blog (and I'll start one one of these days :P), I would definitely want free, crowd-sourced editing that way!

I love the idea and not just for blogs. Think about this button's application in learning environments like Coursera lecture notes or a Now You Lost Me! button that allow users to append their thoughts to specific parts of a lecture or video. Or what about a button you can press in a physical classroom? It's really quite wonderful.

I agree with some of the comments though, my first reaction was, "Don't leave it at where they got lost, let them tell you why." Maybe when users click the button a text box can fly out (gethopper.com does this really well) that allows users to append notes. In some cases admins will read all the feedback, but if you want to get really fancy you could parse the responses for common themes, keywords, etc to identify the most common points of confusion.

Looking forward to seeing this develop, this is great.

> Think how cool it would be, if we had this button in lecture notes and so on!

Years ago (2002?), I heard about a Uni that was handing out little clickers that TV audiences get for live voting.

With these, students could rate how much they were understanding as the lecture went along, or the lecturer could put up multi-choice questions for an instant gauge of how well the students got it. (Crucially, all voting was anonymous so students didn't feel like they were being tested.)

Apparently it really helped lecturers, but there was more than once when the lecturer came to a complete stop because they didn't know where to go. (Better than carrying on blindly not knowing no-ones with you tho.)

These days, with cheap smart-phones and wifi on campus it would be easy to do something similar with just a website.

I'd be very interested if you could provide a link to the Uni experiment you're talking about. Tried google without luck. Thanks

We used a device called an "iclicker" at my school that could do all of this, though it was pretty much only used for paperless pop quizzes.

One benefit was immediately after, the teacher could display a bar chart showing the correct multiple choice answer and how many students voted for each of A,B,C,D thereby giving students and idea of where they ranked in the class.

http://www.iclicker.com/

How is that a benefit? Won't that just promote feelings of smugness or worry? Surely a students independent learning is what's important, not where they rank in an arbitrary group of others? Did they really emphasise this aspect of it?

It was a decade ago and I can't remember any names, so probably not. Pretty sure it was the University of Stirling (UK) if that helps. Sorry.

This is a really awesome idea, but it's missing an option to give a comment with my confusion. It would be much clearer for the author if I could specify what exactly confuses me.

Your comment confuses me.

Were you trying to say Krista lost you before the first PS ?

No, I think Swizec was saying that he wanted the ability to write text after clicking "Now you lost me!", to explain just why he is lost. For instance, he might click the button and then write "I don't know who you meant by 'they' in the second sentence." into a text field that popped up before clicking "Send Feedback". Giving more specific feedback might help Krista fix the exact part of the post that is broken more easily.

I love it! We have a similar thing in my company. We run a hosted CI service (https://circleci.com), and occasionally tests on Circle, but don't locally for the customer. That would just cause the customer to stop using us (and therefore not sign up at the end of the trial).

So we added a "report this build" button, and some text: "Uh-oh, this failed. If you didn't expect it to, report this build and we'll look into it". Since we added it about 3 months ago, this has led to dozens of bug fixes on our end, tons of improvements to the docs and language in the app, and lots of conversations with customers which helped us refine the product.

We should definitely add the same thing to our docs, like Stripe does. See the footer at https://stripe.com/docs/api

It might be better to implement with a small (fits inline with text) '?' icon next to each paragraph; clicking on it will show (or hide) a text field where you can type your question.

Bonus points if you use cookies or server-side state to make the user's question persistent (he's able to see what he typed if he reloads the page) and have a way to see a list of all the latest comments across your website on one page.

This should be integrated with A/B testing (or some variant).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com