Tumgik
#widgets are so dope and they should be the standard for desktop layouts
heilos · 8 months
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Having loud thoughts again, but you know what would be an absolutely baller idea for tumblr's layout? Everything being a full widget system, especially on the dashboard. I'm just using this as an example, but the old UI for deviantart, dated as it is now by website standards visually, worked off a widget like system where you had so much control over how your profile page was displayed. Certain elements/boxes could be dragged and placed on your page and then adjusted via preset options or through a bit of light coding shenanigans. Imagine that, but with the tumblr dashboard. Instead of being stuck in just one format, you could drag your navigation bar to the left or right or if you don't like that you could pull it up top instead. Or you could have a widget on the side bar like xkit does for tag tracking, or trending tags or just not have any of that on the dashboard. Or how about a widget purely to keep track of recent mutuals that will take you directly to a full list in one click or a widget listing your current que ect ect. All of these being movable pieces yeah? The main point being the ability for a user to rearrange their dashboard to their liking for the best personal navigation with the least amount of clicks. I think the idea of drag and dropping UI elements is taken for granted on most current social media sites even though it's extremely intuitive once you understand it's a feature that exists and how clunky things feel when you don't have it or it's taken away. There's personal website builders that already use widgets pretty frequently, so why not extend that to bigger websites that rely on plenty of consistent user navigation daily? Like imagine updates that could be about adding in highly requested new widgets or adjusting functionality of current widgets to perform better based on user feedback. I am not a coder so I don't know how difficult it would be to implement a robust widget system for a large scale social media website, but it's been on my mind for years now with trying out all kinds of beta art sites before. I really think something like that would be worth the investment for a place like tumblr and potentially cut down on a lot of discontent over layout changes.
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