Experimenting with New Comment UI Features on Stack Overflow

Concern: First 5 comments

I really don't like this change, personally. There's plenty of popular questions that, unfortunately, have received dozens of comments over the years. Showing the first 5, which may be very outdated by the time a user sees them doesn't feel like good UX to me.

Concern: Space

I don't usually complain about whitespace in UI redesigns. I tend to find that people that complain about an extra 5 pixels padding are making mountains out of molehills.

That being said, the new design takes up a lot of space. I'm looking at answers on this post that have multiple comments with small paragraphs, and they're smaller than comments that have 1-2 lines of text with the redesign.

I think too much importance is given to things that ultimately don't matter for comments: The user's profile picture and the reputation/badges indicator. As well as the new "Vote" button.

Concern: The "Vote" button

I understand that it's probably referred to as the vote button internally, but it was previously labelled as the "This comment adds something useful to the post" button via tooltip. I think labelling it as "Helpful" (or something to that effect) instead of "Vote" might be better to discourage it becoming a defacto "Agree" button. At the very least, consider adding the tooltip again as a reminder to users.

The padding/gap between the comment's text and the button is too big. I agree with @starball's answer. It should be underneath the profile picture (especially if it's going to be that big).

The gap between the arrow and the button's text seems needlessly large. It looks kind of bad as-is.

Concern: Visual hierarchy

The comment's layout seems to be kind of all over the place:

• The three dots is at the top right.
• The vote button at the bottom left.
• The flag button at the bottom right, and only appears if you hover on it.

I think the flag should be visible at all times, instead of requiring the user to hover on the comment.

Alternatively, place it in the three dots menu (but I'd rather it be more prominent like it used to be, personally).

Concern: Mobile-friendliness

The three dots menu seems to go off-screen on smaller mobile screen sizes due to the reputation and badge indicators taking up all the space.

Additionally, the report flag is unusable, since mobile users can't actually hover on comments (not reliably, at least).