Discussion: an integrated News and Activity timeline on /news/ (Option B) #268

In the design review for the News and Activity pages (#266), Claude Design drew two ways to show Activity on /news/. Option A develops the two-thirds News, one-third Activity layout suggested in #266. Option B is the designer's integrated timeline. We're building Option A, a side rail, for now. This issue keeps Option B open for a team discussion before we decide whether to revisit it.

For background: #265 splits updates into News (announcements people write: new projects, grants, people, workshops) and Activity (library releases, lecture updates and translation updates, written by the reporter bot). The definitions cover only what each stream contains. Where each one is shown is a design choice.

What Option B is

• /news/ becomes one reverse-chronological timeline.
• News posts are the milestones: they keep the full news card, on a solid blue marker.
• Activity fills the gaps between posts as compact rows on hollow markers. Each run of activity shows its first 5 rows, then a "Show N more updates" button with the date range and a count by type.
• Two tabs, News and activity and News only, let a reader hide the activity.
• On wide screens, a sidebar holds a legend, feed links and a link to the full activity log.
• The home-page counterpart (c4) puts the three latest posts on a small timeline, with each gap summarised in one line.

For comparison, Option A keeps the news cards as the main column (two-thirds of the page) and adds a sticky Activity rail (one-third) showing the latest six entries, with a link to the full log.

Screenshots

Option A:

Option B:

Mobile

The case for Option B

• Context. It shows what happened between announcements, and how much, in one place.
• Visible activity. It meets John's aim from Split updates into News and an Activity feed #265 most directly: "Anyone who glances at news will see that we're active and that's about it."
• Tidy runs. Runs collapse, so a long stretch between posts shows 5 rows and a "Show N more" button, however many updates it holds.

Why we're starting with Option A

• Activity leads the page most of the time. Activity is almost always newer than the latest post, so under B the page opens with a run of bot-written activity on roughly 95% of days. That estimate comes from a simulation using the real gaps between past News posts (roughly one a month) and the 6–7 activity entries a week expected once the reporter is working again.
• On a phone, the latest announcement is rarely on the first screen. From the artboard measurements and the same simulation, it's above the fold on only about 7–14% of days. This is the problem the split was meant to fix.
• The page grows with the log. As handed off, every activity entry would sit in the page's HTML, mostly hidden. Today the 20 most recent posts (about two years) span the whole log. Once the log is older than that, a trailing run after the 20th post would hold everything older and keep growing.
• It costs more to build. Option A also needs a sticky sidebar and a mobile layout. On top of those, B needs grouping and counts for each run, collapse behaviour, tabs, spine and marker rules, and mobile versions of every timeline item.
• Option A meets both aims on every screen size: announcements first, and a visible sign that the project is active. Announcements lead the page, and the rail shows the latest activity at a glance (on a phone, as a collapsed panel). It's also less busy.

If we revisit Option B

The designer suggested capping the first run at 3 rows, or pinning the latest post above it. The review combined these, with a limit on how much activity the page shows, into a guarded version:

• a pinned "Latest announcement" card above the tabs. Of the designer's two suggestions, only this one brings the latest post onto a phone's first screen;
• the run at the top of the page capped at 3 rows;
• a bounded window: activity only above the newest 2–3 posts, with older activity left to the full log at /activity/.

Questions for the team

1. When someone lands on /news/, especially on a phone, should they see the latest announcement first or recent activity first?
2. Once it's live, does Option A's rail, together with the "Latest activity" strip under the home page's news cards, do enough to show that the project is active?
3. Will we post News at least once a month? If not, the top of the page under B would be permanently activity, and a pinned post would often be months old.
4. When should we revisit this? A natural point is once the reporter is working again (see QuantEcon/reports-activity#91, a private repository), with a few weeks of real activity volume and the phone/desktop split for /news/ from Google Analytics.

Related

• Design review: Activity and News pages #266: the design review, and the home of these decisions.
• Split updates into News and an Activity feed #265: the News/Activity split and its definitions.
• NEWS: move to a single weekly news post to reduce noise + only report changes to lectures and major software (QuantEcon.py, mystmd etc.) #225: the original discussion about news noise.