A Bug Report for Twitch.tv - Notices for People you Follow
/!\ I do not work for Twitch.tv so nobody get any idears
Twitch.tv, fix yer game!
Context: Screenshot
Twitch notifies you via email when someone you follow starts streaming. You can also select a subset of the streamers you follow to be notified about. The interface to select a subset of the streamers you follow displays 6 people before it starts paginating the rest. I follow 30 people so I have 5 pages.
Problem:
Once you choose who to get notified about from one page, you must click "Save Changes" before moving on to the next page. If you make changes to the list and navigate to page two of the list of streamers, the changes made to page one will be lost. It didn't work as I'd expected it to. Maybe I equated traversing through the list of streamers right to left with scrolling the page up and down and understood neither would impact my state.
The following list can be very large, yet the page needs to be small enough to put a save button at the end.
I also assumed that the solution couldn't take fucking forever, so no massive redesigns. Nobody wants to hear that shit when manager are breathing down your neck from across the room. This is design jujitsu. Get in. Get out.
Solution 1: Increase items per page
If the number of items per page is increased to something larger than the average following count of 80% of the site's users, a majority of users would never face this issue. This is the solution that appeals to me the most because it's something I would actually do were I working at Twitch. It would be an easy quick fix for a problem we don't have much time for.
Of course, that doesn't definitively solve the problem, just put off a little longer. Once the average number of following per user increases, the problem will resurface. Hopefully by that time, IRL, the team would have already moved on with a better design anyway.
Solution 2: Somehow make the list persist state
The pages can be fixed to maintain state as the user traverses through it, and the entire list would be updated when save is hit. Of course, I don't know what it would take to accomplish this, but the design would stay almost exactly the same. Only the list header would change to reflect an accurate state of the list as the user manipulates a large list which is mostly out of view his view.
––––––––––––
If you're still reading, the title "A bug report" is supposed to be a joke. Technically, there were no bugs in what I described. It's the coupling of various design decisions that lead to a sort of "usability bug". But it's always fun to piss off developers by using developer-speak incorrectly, like saying a missing feature is a bug. Mwahaha!