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After a long hiatus, a new Custom Question Lists update is out with a fresh new design.
What's shipped?
If you are participating in the Custom Question List alpha (by checking a box on your profile and waiting), you'll see some brand new UI components when viewing question lists:
New tab bar and editor
Based on your feedback, we decided to rethink the whole UI, removing some confusing and redundant components, and bringing back some much loved pieces. The new design is closer to "the existing question lists with advanced options" than "a radically new experience". Huge shoutouts to our new designer, Lisa, for making this new design possible and to Jane for picking up development while I was on sabbatical!
Some important notes for existing testers:
- The summary is back in its rightful place next to the tab bar. If bounty or unanswered filters applied, the summary provides a clearer explanation of what you're looking at, inspired by
/unanswered
. - The "Filter" and "Sort" popovers are gone. Sort was too similar to the existing tabs, and Filter was a form in a popover. (how were you supposed to submit or cancel?) Now there's a dedicated UI for filtering.
- The complex "Create" and "Edit" modals are gone. Now you just configure your list with the same UI as if you were filtering and click "Save filter" when you're ready to save.
- You can preview your changes before updating a filter. Editing a saved filter and clicking apply shows you your new options while remembering what filter you were looking at. You can then click "Save filter" to either update your existing filter or create a new one.
- We handle responsive better. The tab bar has been set up so it compresses more naturally on narrower browsers and mobile devices.
New sidebar widget
A new right-sidebar widget has been added, similar to Watched Tags, to give you more direct access to your saved lists. This is where indicators will live in Phase 3 (which I swear we are actually going to ship).
Please give it a try. If you have any questions, bugs, or feedback, you can reply to this post directly or add a new question with the custom-question-lists tag.
A wider alpha
Since we're nearing launch, we're expanding the alpha out to the whole network. So feel free to try this out on any site you frequent, to help suss out any site-specific issues.
What's next?
As always, Phase 3 of this project is adding indicators for new content, now in the right sidebar widget.
There's increasing interest in this feature from Enterprise, so I do really expect this to ship and get out of Alpha sooner rather than later and this time, I mean it.