What are users thinking

This week, Pedro discussed his thoughts with me about the title design in telescope. He wants to make the title section smaller.

This is how telescope handling the post title,

The title stick to the top when you scroll up, so that you can always see the title while you keep scrolling down and reading the post.
If the title length is too long, we wrapped it with ...; and it can be expanded after user click the title.

However, once the title is expanded, the title section is twice big. It'll occupy too much space of the screen.

It's smart to find out this issue. I have little knowledge of user experience, so I never figure this out. This is a great chance for me to dig into this field.

The solution Pedro came up is to dynamically adjust font size. In the other word, when the title overflowed, the font-size will be adjusted to be smaller and able to fit the div element.

We've tried different approaches to make it work, but none of them came with an expected result. Therefore, we were thinking removing the sticky title feature. As Dave suggested, when we're making changes on the UI design, we should always consider user's "habit". For example, in other similar kinds of websites, how do they design this feature? Users usually get used to one kind of design in a specific type of website. There, browsing other blog-post websites about how they handle a long title is a good way to start.

In medium and dev.to, there is no sticky title design. The title goes to the second or the third line if it's too long. However, it's not the same as our telescope. We have only one timeline, gathering all the posts (the whole post, without "read more" feature) from different authors.

In the meeting, some team members said that they don't really need the title once they start to read one post; but some do. The team came up with a solution which is to make the font-size of title smaller so that in most cases, the title will remain one line. Our title font-size is about 3 times bigger than the content font-size. To compare with some similar websites, they're doing much smaller size for their title.

Better? Can you still tell this is a title of the post?

Biweekly release makes us keep shipping changes. Sometimes, there is no perfect solution for one issue. But, shipping changes in each release makes our project better and better, even if it's just a small change in every release.