Make "random" button more accessible

[nleoutsa]

The randomize button is great fun, but its placement at the top makes it difficult to reach. Since nothing happens when you swipe left from the most recent page in history, perhaps it could default to load a random page from the current ZIM file?

Alternatively, we could add an option to relocate the randomize button to the bottom bar for easier access.

[kelson42]

@BPerlakiH Does not swipe left should alloq to navigate back in the history?

[rgaudin]

@BPerlakiH Does not swipe left should alloq to navigate back in the history?

@nleoutsa suggests that this behavior would be only for first article, when there's no (more) history to go to.

I don't think it's a good idea: too unexpected and non-intuitive. But maybe the random feature is not visible/accessible enough…

[BPerlakiH]

Thank you for your suggestion @nleoutsa.
I agree with the above that adding this feature to the top of the "stack", when there's no more page to go back to would be probably confusing, and would lead to other navigation issues as well.

Our current bottom bar is quite packed already, and there's literarily no more space left.
The most compact version of that view is the iPad slide over view:

I remember that adding one more icon there makes the icons "overflow" the width.
That leaves us only one option to swap out the icons (we need to remove something to be able to add something else in place).

The top candidate from my perspective would be the "share" button... but it's hard to tell.

Since we do not gather analytics on our users, it's hard to tell which button is more frequently used by the majority of Kiwix users.

[nleoutsa]

this behavior would be only for first article, when there's no (more) history to go to.

when there's no more page to go back to would be probably confusing

Sorry, these descriptions are the opposite of what I meant. I meant when you are on the most RECENT page visited, and there is no page to swipe FORWARD to, that it could be fun to have the "swipe forward in history" behavior trigger a random article rather than doing nothing. On my device, swipe left moves forward on history, not back.

Alternatively, exposing the ability to customise which buttons appear at the bottom would circumvent needing to make the choice for users based on usage statistics.

[nleoutsa]

I agree the swipe idea is not the most intuitive, but wonder if some visual indicators would help. Perhaps when you start swiping past the most recent history item, a screen slides in with a message like "You've reached the most recent page in your history. We'll load a random article for you." A similar page could slide by when going back in history between "history blocks" (consecutive history entries where a direct link was followed rather than a random page loaded).

I'm just brainstorming ways to replace doom-scrolling social media/news with knowledge discovery and would love to hear other ideas!

[BPerlakiH]

I see what you mean now. I am still not convinced about the swipe approach. Customising the button placement is more interesting in this approach. Maybe we will come back to this, and use the new tab bar from iOS 18 for iPads (the current minimum is iOS: 16.6).

[nleoutsa]

Love that idea, thanks for considering!

[kelson42]

@BPerlakiH Would you be able to propose a mockup of the change you have in mind?

[BPerlakiH]

@nleoutsa @kelson42

I had a look at this again. I think the essential question we need to answer is what is the exact problem we want to solve.

My current understanding is that it would mainly apply to iOS / iPhone, where the problem is that the random button is too far up the screen, so the user needs to "stretch the fingers" to get there (or use the other hand). Current placement of the random button:

I did some experiments with this and checked what is possible, and what is not. Apple's HIG says:
"iOS toolbars aren’t customizable, and they don’t support grouping."

What we can do though is re-arrange the buttons, for example move the random button closer to other navigation related icons: