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Tool Short Description Lengths

Topic Type: 
Problem

After reading RJ’s post about avatar image sizes, it got me thinking about other standardized sizes. One thing which may be beneficial would be a more standardized height for tools on the tools list page. As of right now the amount of space tools take up is correlated to the length of the description and/or the size of the image. Tools with longer descriptions take up significantly more space than others and stretch out the list. You could always impose a restriction on how long the short description can be, but perhaps a more subtle way to reduce this would be to only display a substring of the description text that limits how much of the description is actually displayed on the list page, with the addition of a “Read More” link which can allow a user to display the entire body of the text if they are curious about what they see. Or you could skip the "Read More" option altogether and simply have users go and view the tool's actual profile to get the full write up. Keeping the height of the tools more uniform would help keep the tools page consistent and prevent users from unnecessary scrolling.

R.J. Steinert's picture

Hi David, I've thought about doing that even for the Tool Wikis themselves. I think what we might be going for is having the tool's profile, the tool's wiki, and the forum all "below the fold". Below the fold is a term used to describe everything you see before you have to scroll down. So everything "above the fold" is the dream, but your suggestion is a good place to start until we have time to do a serious redesign of the tool pages. -RJ