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> When I'm working with a GitHub project, I commonly want to load up the page and navigate to some files. If not, it's usually not much scrolling to get down to

> When I'm working with a GitHub project, I commonly want to load up the page and navigate to some files. If not, it's usually not much scrolling to get down to the README. The solution I'm using currently for the git repos hosted on my personal site [0] is to show the projects file tree above the README, but allow it to be collapsed by clicking on the projects root directory. Originally, the project tree was collapsed by default, but the click through rate was quite low, so the expanded view became the default. [0] https://octobanana.com/software/fltrdr https://octobanana.com/software/fltrdr

tedunangst 8y ago
Is the front end itself available?
- octobanana 8y ago
  It's all server-side rendered. I've been considering open sourcing the site, but there's some cleaning up to be done first.
cbsks 8y ago
Do you mean that your metrics showed that few people were expanding the tree, so you made it expanded by default? I would interpret the data as meaning that most people don’t care about the list of files, so it’s better for them to be hidden by default.
- octobanana 8y ago
  > Do you mean that your metrics showed that few people were expanding the tree, so you made it expanded by default? Correct, after it became expanded by default, the hit rate for project files was dramatically higher, showing that users did care about viewing the files. Perhaps the UI could better indicate that it can be collapsed/expanded, but it could also be that it doesn't match the common UX found on the big sites like GitHub that users have become accustomed with.
  - cbsks 8y ago
    Ah, I misunderstood slightly. I thought you were only talking about the click to expand the tree. If the hits to the files increased, then it makes sense to have it expanded by default.
    - octobanana 8y ago
      > I thought you were only talking about the click to expand the tree. That makes sense. It would have been an interesting stat to compare, but the metrics only come from resource requests, as those pages don't run any scripts.

tedunangst 8y ago

Is the front end itself available?

octobanana 8y ago
It's all server-side rendered. I've been considering open sourcing the site, but there's some cleaning up to be done first.

cbsks 8y ago

Do you mean that your metrics showed that few people were expanding the tree, so you made it expanded by default? I would interpret the data as meaning that most people don’t care about the list of files, so it’s better for them to be hidden by default.

octobanana 8y ago
> Do you mean that your metrics showed that few people were expanding the tree, so you made it expanded by default? Correct, after it became expanded by default, the hit rate for project files was dramatically higher, showing that users did care about viewing the files. Perhaps the UI could better indicate that it can be collapsed/expanded, but it could also be that it doesn't match the common UX found on the big sites like GitHub that users have become accustomed with.
- cbsks 8y ago
  Ah, I misunderstood slightly. I thought you were only talking about the click to expand the tree. If the hits to the files increased, then it makes sense to have it expanded by default.
  - octobanana 8y ago
    > I thought you were only talking about the click to expand the tree. That makes sense. It would have been an interesting stat to compare, but the metrics only come from resource requests, as those pages don't run any scripts.