Design and UI discussion of subscription/follow features, nomenclature

[jywarren]

Copying in from #2104 --

Design discussion

Patterns

• Let's standardize our use of the term "subscribe" and "follow".
  • We also use subscribe when we suggest that people "subscribe to the Community Science Forum". However, this page is terribly out of date: https://publiclab.org/subscribe
  • Just for reference, we use "sign up" in relation to the newsletter and the website itself.
  • "Follow" isn't really used anywhere else and I suggest we change all instances of "Follow" to "subscribe"
  • What do you think?
• There are an emerging set of ideas about pinning main research areas to the top of the dashboard Dashboard overwhelmed with just a few posts on a single topic #2076, and about showing clusters of related tags to help people see the dimensions of a research area tag visualization of all tags #1502
• what are other patterns we could aspire to?

Overview of how people are presented with information about and control over their subscriptions

The places on our site where one can control subscriptions vary widely:

Primarily:

• in the unlabelled-except-for-person-emoji "account" dropdown menu, there is a link to https://publiclab.org/subscriptions

• That link takes you to the dedicated page that is personalized to your user account https://publiclab.org/subscriptions

• on the tag page where all tags are listed https://publiclab.org/tags, you have the option to "follow" AKA subscribe and to see how many people are already following that tag. You can also sort by "subscription to bring all the tags you already follow to the top.

• on tag pages such as https://publiclab.org/tag/kite-mapping, you are offered the option to "Follow" the tag, and are also offered the unique opportunity of getting the RSS feed (is this shown anywhere else? should it be?)

[chanjess]

This is very cool and interesting to read. What are the updates on this? I think that the consolidation of "follow" and "subscribe" makes sense and is intuitive.

[ebarry]

Here's an update that makes great progress toward this, a new listing of the largest research areas on publiclab.org in the sidebar:

Clicking on a blue topic offers the ability to "Follow" right from the dashboard.

[jywarren]

Closing, as we've made tons of progress and are now using "follow" everywhere!