Eliminate extra step with its accompaning cognitive-load

[dgroos]

Upon clicking a post and arriving at the page, only the Post itself is shown--scroll down and you will see none of the discussion surrounding this Problem. To see the comments, one must locate the page elements/buttons showing the views (Map/Thread/KT/Person/Date), then choose which view one wants, and then click on that view. Until this is done, one will not complete the original cognitive goal of seeing the target problem space.

An alternative would be to have a default view and immediately show it with all of it's comments. Most importantly, this would help a student slide into the new page without requiring a substantial cognitive load, especially required for non-expert FLE4 users. In other words, it would eliminate an unnecessary choice. I recommend automatically showing the "Thread View" as this requires little CPU, is also colorful, is easy/quick to scroll/scan-down the page, viewing all text. Then, as need arose, students could consider/choose other views.

A couple minor ideas accompanying this would be to re-order the buttons to put "as a thread" before "on a map" (going with the idea that thread view become the default view). Perhaps this would allow one to then eliminate the 2-step process required to view as a map thereby removing the "Open Map View" icon/button and only using the grey "on a map" button, further minimalizing/polishing the interface.

Finally, of less importance still, change the button that says "as thread" to say "as a thread" to be 'parallel' with the text on the map button that says, "on a map". Just polishing!