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Some thoughts about Gemini UX

Rohan Kumar seirdy at seirdy.one

Mon Feb 22 20:32:46 GMT 2021

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On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 09:07:20PM +0100, Hans Gerwitz wrote:

It’s important for users to experience a sense of place as they

navigate (as per Luke Emmet’s “cognitive aspects” thread from May 2020)

but also important to give content creators some control over the

presentation of their text.

Already we see extensive use of ASCII art. This is retro-cool but I

would argue favicons or theme colors are actually *more* minimal, and

also more attractive to 21st century users.

I think that the lack of aesthetic branding is one of the best parts of the Gemini space. Capsules should be distinguished by content, not appearance. Presentation should be up to the user-agent, not the authors. If branding is important for a site, then the Web is probably a better fit for it than Gemini or Gopher.

I appreciate the need to avoid spurious network requests, especially

across servers. But rules like “user takes action” are impossible to

enforce (and scrolling is an action).

Actions equivalent to navigation should work. When navigating to a link pointing to an image, displaying that image inline should suffice.

Scrolling isn't sufficient because users can't see what's "below the fold" and therefore can't consent to sending a network request to an unknown resource. This could also be used for tracking; authors could "measure" how far a reader as scrolled by seeing which images got loaded.

Inline images should only be used if they're a necessary part of the content and alt-text won't suffice. Readers should be able to decide if this is the case from the context and make a decision; the decision should not be made by authors.

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