Re: The BuddyPress UI Design and conceptual approach to Social Networking
@xspringe You are correct. The BP interface should be designed for the end user. This keys off my peeve that BP is marketing itself as enabling social networking “out of the box”. Yes, it can but not without some tweaking for each specific site application. And I’m not talking about simple template colour choices or layout modifications.
If we look at Facebook or Twitter, both of these do the same basic thing once a user logs in. The user is taken to the page that has all of your friend’s/groups/pages/forums/etc. recent updates. This is a user-centric focus. It plugs the user directly into what they are interested in in the shortest period of time. It can be done with BP but it’s not the default. If it was the default, I think all of the other components would tie in nicely in a very intuitive way.
@Modemlooper I agree – the disconnect between the activity stream commenting and everything else is a huge usability hole. It sucks. At the moment, my only solution is to disable commenting on those activity stream items (which you can with an existing radio button on the options page IIRC). That makes it more confusing for the user but at least we don’t “lose” replies.
