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hypothesis
www gets dropped from full url's on activity pages
On activity pages, the url's are incomplete/don't match.
Note the www is included on the left but is excluded from the full link on the right. This means when users copy the link and paste it into the search bar under the url facet it doesn't find any annotations because the www is missing. Another but somewhat related issue is this full link doesn't include the http(s) either so again it won't find any annotations.
This is by design rather than a bug. The scheme, www prefix and query strings are removed from the URL for readability - similar to what Chrome does in the URL bar. The assumption is that users will either:
- Open the link by clicking on it, which goes to the full URL
- Right-click or long-press on the link and click "Copy Link", in which case they will copy the full link including the scheme and any prefixes removed from the text of the link
The implementation is h.links.pretty_link, and we use it in a couple of places in activity pages.
The feedback I’ve received from users is that it’s confusing. When I started using H I also found it confusing. The primary focus of this page is searching for annotations so I think the UI should be centered around that, not leaving the page. (Although I certainly understand that use case as well-you find the annotation you are looking for and then leave to reply/further annotate.) It seems intuitive that whatever is here should work for the URL facet (since the primary focus of this page is search) but that’s not the case. A big problem here is that we expect our users to somehow already know they need the full link and on top of that to use a right click to get it. Right clicking is typically not a click used in UIs. It’s very rarely used as a secondary and typicaly not used at all. I understand the desire to have a “pretty link” and I think we could still have that and a copy button. I don’t see what you are talking about where chrome drops part of the url. Even if/when it does a distinguishing difference between what you are describing and what we have here is when you click onto the url it gives you the full link to copy and our UI does not. No where in our UI is the full link easily and obviously accessible through primary UI interaction.
The pretty link is used in another location for the user’s profile link which I think is fine. No one is going to need to copy that and paste it back into the search bar. They’ll just click it and go to the page.
I like your thinking around this @hmstepanek. I think that the way we initially designed the annotation cards on activity pages could definitely use some improvements, to make things more intuitive and easier to understand for our users. @dwolfe can you add this (and activity pages in general) as part of your interface inventory, and list of things that need some design attention?
