Inconsistencies in Friends' assets

Just a disclaimer: I work at Six Apart and I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE COMET!  However, I'm not a Comet insider, as I work in a different part of our massively small company.  Below is one in a collection of posts containing my thoughts about (Not)Comet.  Did I mention how much I love Comet?

When surfing through my friends' latest, I noticed something which felt a bit odd:  Navigation between asset types is very different between the posts page and the pages of the other media types.

Let me see if I can explain this nuance...

When you click from your blog to your "Friends" page, you see their latest posts in the center content (see above picture).  On the sidebar, below your profile, you see the latest photos (with a link to the friends photos page -- shown at right) and way down the page you see Books, Music, etc (with respective links).

In comparison, on the Friends Photos page, you see photos in the center and then no posts, music or books on the sidebar.  You are instead given a nav right below the title and above the photos that allows you to surf other assets.

As you navigate to non-post assets the nav nicely persists and the breadcrumb changes to show your current location.  But when you click on posts, the nav disappears and the breadcrumb loses the last element to become something like "Blog name >> USERNAME'S Friends" as seen below.

This nav/breadcrumb inconsistency destroys the interaction flow between assets and seems to place a higher precedence on posts in the asset hierarchy as the default asset type. 

The nav, breadcrumb and Organize inconsistencies aside, I can certainly understand the thinking here.  On LJ, people love reading posts on their Friends page, so posts should be the default asset type and right there ready to read without any extra clicks. However, it seems particularly strange given the low priority of posts in the Organize screen (shown at right) and may, in fact, be the wrong choice for people like rabid photobloggers who care more about their friends photos than what they actually have to say.

More important, I think that by having a default asset type we're missing a golden opportunity.

The Friends Portal page

(*ahem* Puts on best Rod Serling voice)

Imagine if you will a Friends page that contains, at a glance, all of your friend's latest assets regardless of type.  In a center-content stream you see posts, photos, music, books, movies and anything else that we can think up in the future.  Each item would display a link (in addition to the other things like username, date and comment count) indicating its type through which you could go to that asset type page (e.g. the friends' photos page).   At the top of the page you have a nav like the first one above with all of the asset types linked to pages containing only that asset type.  This Friends page view might be called the Friends stream.

In addition to all of the asset types, the nav would also contain an item labelled "show in groups" (or something) which would change the display of the page to be grouped by asset type: a section of posts with only user icons and titles (for brevity), a group of photos, a group for books, etc...  This might be called the Friends portal or, in what would certainly become the Marketing Department's worst nightmare, the Frortal.  (I said it first!  Bite me, Anil.)

The display of this page would be persistent.  That is to say that if you clicked on the Frortal and then navigated away, when you come back to your friends page, that view would be shown and vice versa.  In this way, the user's choice is seamlessly persistent and will usually be the right choice for the user.

In Frummary

In my view, this sort of design makes navigation between elements extremely easy and offers two equally interesting ways to represents ALL of your friends' latest assets without the weird inequity between asset types.  To ease the loss of one click access to an LJ-style friends page (with only posts), the assets types could be listed below the "Friends" link on the sidebar of your blog so that you can go straight to a particular asset type (a good thing all around  anyway if you ask me).

Now, this is in no way a slam on or slight against our fantastic Design/UI group and all of the people who have been working tirelessly on the Comet team.  They developed this entire massive app, literally from the ground up, which if you've never done such a thing you should know that it is a task of Herculean proportions.   In fact, I'm sure that what I've written above has already been brought up in design meetings and either shot full of holes (as my hare-brained ideas so often are) or postponed to a v2 release.

Still, in case perhaps no one thought of it, I thought that I should write it up. 

What say ye, O mighty Comet team?

A side note

This post alone has convinced me of the incredible usefulness and superiority of ySIWYG over any other posting interface mode or mechanism.  It simply did what I needed it to do and then got the hell out of the way.  Who do I have to bribe to get this into Movable Type?