tannerkrewson
Hide in game menu bar by default
Thank @LukeGT for bringing this up!!
my worry with this is with discoverability. like you noticed, it's not clear that it's a button to begin with, so collapsing by default might confuse even more, like players could potentially not realize that they can back out of a game and switch to another, which is an essential feature of rocketcrab, which if they don't know about, they might wish they just didn't have to use rocketcrab. bad. also, in it's current form, if a game has ui in the top right, it looks bad -@tannerkrewson
I'm standing by this for now, but am open to more ideas, especially as users start to be more familiar with rocketcrab, hiding by default could make sense... although now that I'm thinking about it, it's probably a worse idea to change up on the users once they've already figured something out! 😆
I think it's clearer that it's clickable if the icon is the only thing visible, whereas being part of the banner it just looks like decoration.
This is very true. My thinking is that in a group of 🚀🦀 players, there's going to be the one that had the idea to play 🚀🦀 in the first place and is more savvy, and would know about this hidden trick, and tell the rest of the players about it if they want to use it. Hopefully games won't be to badly affected by the loss of space anyways..... i just did the math, and on the smallest screen (iPhone 5), the menu bar only takes up about 8%. (it's actually broken right now, the emojis wrap making it more) still kind of a lot tho.
I think the collapse button shouldn't be the logo, it's totally hidden this way -@alenros
We collectively decided against this because of the limited space in the menu bar, especially on mobile. But maybe there is still another way?? 🤔
For now, I think I'm ok with keeping it like it is.. but would love to hear more feedback as this is one of the most important parts of rocketcrab; it's the screen where users will spend the most time!
Another thought, I'm concerned about players not knowing about the feature, then accidentally tapping it and not knowing what they did. This probably isn't a huge concern given that it is at the top of the screen, not the bottom where your hands are holding your device. But, I think a tooltip may be a good idea to teach users about the feature.
As @LukeGT re-taught me, most of the users will probably use RC on mobile devices, and tool-tip on mobile tend to only help if you know you are looking for them. I think a way to start is by doing something on the desktop version, like adding a collapse icon only for desktop. For mobile, I think the RC logo should be replaced with a collapse icon.
I'm not sure what the proper UX name for them is, but there's a kind of "tooltip" that appears when you first load a page, explaining something like "access the rocketcrab menu here!". The user has to click something to make it go away, either performing the action it suggests (clicking the icon to expand) or clicking a cross to dismiss it (and hopefully reading it, or at least realising that there's a thing in the corner that they can click).
Probably overkill right now, but if there are user complaints about screen real estate or visual untidiness or something it might be a good investment.
They are called guiders, and here is a nice implementation: https://github.com/pickhardt/Guiders-JS