Image 2 for this complete post: https://forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/t/feature-request-suggestion-new-beat-color-management-beat-necessity-level-and-subtext-display/1917?u=emhmark7
Tags are added to end of title, but in a separate area, possibly with Color and Bold, per word basis, like in a word processor.
This part could include both:
-Tags other than NECESSITY (or those taken care of in the unique category level that would control beat color)
-Subtext from a field in Beat Edit, or editable directly in the beat display.
This has a small amount of potential in a mode we’re considering where beats in the whiteboard are much larger and more text is shown. In that world, we’re no longer trying to save space, and then it’s easier to let loose and throw in more stuff.
The main problem, as I see it, is that I’ve seen enough user documents to know that people often have very long tag names. That suddenly doesn’t scale so well. So I still believe in icons more, because icons are different enough to your brain that if you have a red fish icon, you don’t need all the text.
But in general, if we show larger beats, then in that mode, it’s far more permissible to pile on with icons. Or text.
Text should be a last resort. We need to know if icons work.
I think in the past I made suggestions about icons, but I think you raised the “Christmas tree” concern (Although the user could decide how much colors and tags are used)
But thinking about it now, we need to consider:
Many icons of same color might not be easily noticable.
At the other extreme, too many icons (one different color for each) might also become a problem
So, even for icons, it could help enabling/disabling display of 1 or 2 or 3… aspect(s) at a time, allowing display of icons specific to an aspect.
Another possible option is to put maybe 1 or 2 letters in the icon.
Ex. displaying character moods in the beat, where there are 2 characters or more. The same icon, but of different color, would display a different mood.
There could be then several moods of same icone (About mood), but of different colors (Which mood). The color would be about the mood, not about which character. The 1-2 letters would display which character it is about.
Remains the value of having a color gradient for each character, and the idea of selecting a value withe the need of removing the previous value (The radio button - one active at a time).
For that, several levels need to be associated to the same aspect: we could only select one at a time.
I think it deserves tests to find out what kind of icon-load you can take. It would help a lot of the icons weren’t inside circles, but literally had different shapes. I believe you can enter emojis, so I would love if you could try pasting emojis into your beats, at scale, and find out in real life if one can make any sense of it at all when it’s flying by.
But as an untested hypothesis, I believe in the shape icons.
And then I believe in a tag selector by the side of the whiteboard. The way to test this would be to take a week or two where you make an effort to select tags in Research, which highlights them in the whiteboard, and see it produces any cognitive benefit in real-time.
We’ve built so many things that seemed like a good idea that turned out to be nearly useless when you got to interact with them. So it’s important to find ways to test some minimum viable version of it without actually building it.
Ultimately, the goal of these features is to make something go pop in the brain that make you feel that you understand the story now.
