Last modified: 2014-01-05 05:00:55 UTC
Created attachment 12771 [details] Central notice absolutely positioned at the top to cause no shifting of page content at all Since the CentralNotice banner is inserted using JavaScript, it is not yet present on page load but displays with some delay. When the banner gets inserted, it shifts the whole page content down. This causes two problems: 1) The shifting often takes place when I'm just about to follow a link on my watchlist or on history pages. The moment I click the content shifts down and I'm clicking nowhere or even follow the wrong link. This happens quite a lot actually! 2) Even neglecting the shifting issue, the CentralNotice changes layout of pages. Most noticeable, the heading of a page (which I think is a central part of a page if not *the* central part) is shifted. While its at least not an usability problem like 1) I don't like it all personally - what do others think? I therefore propose to think about a different way to show the CentralNotice. I solved it temporarily with some CSS to absolutely position the "#siteNotice" div at the top of the page (see attachment), but this is far from perfect (It breaks as soon as the buttons are shifted or the browser window is reduced to very small width). However it gives a nice impression of what *could* be possible. I'm sure one could come up with a comparable solution which is nice and clean , though.
Related bug 26234, which is about page anchors not correctlyworking because of the shifting.
I'll give you points for coming up with a solution that works for large screen resolutions but as you pointed out it doesn't work so amazingly for small resolutions. Sadly it also only works for those banners which are 'standard' and in page. Fundraising banners which take up all of the top will also cause a bounce... :( We are aware of the issue and we keep taking steps in an attempt to reduce the 'time to bounce' but the only way to eliminate it completely, for generic banners, is to add the banner at page render time or via injection in the caching layer. We've addressed this very issue in the past by optimizing our delivery workflow but we obviously still have work to do. What if we put in a timer that said after 0.x seconds after page load we 'slide' in the content rather that just showing it immediately? That would at least give you some warning that it's coming.
Created attachment 12789 [details] Proof of concept of CentralNotice banner that would be both: More visible and implementable without messing with page layout. Actually I like sliding even less. I'm no friend of dynamic page content at all as you might have noticed. Sort of fundamental question: Is the current layout fixed (e.g. should it be considered as a design constraint) or could we freely edit it? In the latter case see my attachment for a rough design proposal how the banner could be changed to nicely fit into the currently existing space without the need to mess with page layout. * The banner is at the top of the page (where important banners belong), therefore highly visible. * The banner is not longer part of the "#content" div (were it doesn't belong) and it is not necessary to mess with the layout to make room for it. * The banner only shows a heading by default. Therefore one can quickly see if the notice is relevant and expand it as necessary while it only has a small footprint when one isn't interested. * The extended banner could extend even further to the bottom and to the right to allow for large messages with far more text (currently all information needs to always be hidden behind a link, since no more information would fit into the space offered by the current banner). I hop you like my way to "think different" since the current design is far from optimal (as you say yourself, there is no clean solution to prevent shifting). Maybe this might be a slight indication of poor design after all? My proposal seems to solve the problem completely while even improving upon current design (at least in my opinion).
I, sadly, don't have much to add here. This is, literally, one of the longest running discussions on central notice (if not the longest running one) we've made the bump much better but it is not going to be perfect. You are correct, your design would be nice for the bump and it's certainly an option for people to use but it is unlikely to become the default people use. It's benefits for you (less annoying, only showing a header, need to click to see the rest) are also the weaknesses for some of those showing the banner (less annoying, significantly less see it and find out more). In the end that is a possibility in the current (though not default) CN system and I would personally prefer to see it used more often but I have to be honest and say I wouldn't use it for things that I 'really' wanted people to see. I've found that small banners like that are just too easily ignored with banner blindness and people move on. I think coming up with creative ways to do the banner is very helpful, but in the end this is more of a selling process of convincing those who use the banner (both community and staff) to use them. In the end I would prefer to try and find a way to lessen or eliminate the bump, but I also know that we have been working on it for years off and on without finding a great answer and it is not going to happen overnight.
To be clear the biggest problem, by far, that I've seen as we've inspected this in the past is the geolocation. Because we don't know where the user is from right away there is a delay as the page finds out WHERE they are and then has to decide what banner to show.
