Hello again, fellow Lithosphereans,

As part of our continuous coverage of User Experience topics around Lithium Communities, we are happy to announce a little bit of incremental improvement that some of you have eagerly awaited for:

Introducing Relative Dates.

Summary: In our quest to make our UI friendlier and your communities' content feel even more relevant to your users, we now allow you to choose “Relative Dates” versus the standard numeric date stamp (starting with Lithium 9.0.3 and refined on upcoming 9.0.4).

What is so great about this feature?

Look at the standard experience of any board. Current dates are so precise that on a column, they need to be parsed one by one. They use numeric values, which do not allow for a webbed narrative or a contextual tie to the user’s concept of NOW.

Which system does allow you to get a faster gauge of the content's freshness? Which method seems more natural to you or your community's audience? Independently of the answer, you have a choice for either one. I should note that Relative Dates do offer a quick tooltip on rollover displaying the precise date should you need it (so you can get the best of both worlds).

Because we believe that Relative Dates are more human-readable, It would be the default for all new communities, but because we don’t presume to know better than you... It will be off by default on upgrading communities. You can change it ether way.

Enjoy!

<geek info begins>

Now, for those of you that love this short of minutia, lets go on how we implemented it and how you can further customize it:
We adopted a decreasing granularity of relative dates, under the knowledge that the average context awareness becomes less precise over time.

Therefore:

• Today (1st hour): Granular on minutes   
• Today (Rest of day): Granular on hours   
• Yesterday: Granular on AM/PM  
• Rest of the week: Granular on days   
• Rest of month: Granular on weeks
• Rest of year: Granular on months

In Settings > Layout Settings > Date and Time Settings you will have a couple of useful choices:

1. You will be able to uncheck “Use Date Names” if you prefer day and month numbers instead of name.

2. You will be able to choose the moment where to stop relative dates using “Relative Date Max Age (Days)”

That way, you may decide to list the first month as relative, and anything older in numeric dates... Your call. Different people recall events and dates on different manner. Use what works best for your community.

Your settings, by the way, are specific to each board, and all associated content to that board (columns, messages, search results, etc) will adopt the standard chosen.

<übber geek info begins>

Since we are in the groove of date customization... Lets remember some of the powerful settings that were already available in your admin.
Independently of your use of Relative Dates, you can customize your date stamp in numerous ways:

In the Admin tool, at “Date Display Format” you can configure the MM-dd-yyyy string to achieve any desired effect (for those techy people in the audience: we adopted the Java SimpleDateFormat Class).

Letter	Date or Time Component	Presentation	Examples
G	Era designator	Text	AD
y	Year	Year	1996; 96
M	Month in year	Month	July; Jul; 07
w	Week in year	Number	27
W	Week in month	Number	2
D	Day in year	Number	189
d	Day in month	Number	10
F	Day of week in month	Number	2
E	Day in week	Text	Tuesday; Tue
a	Am/pm marker	Text	PM
H	Hour in day (0-23)	Number	0
k	Hour in day (1-24)	Number	24
K	Hour in am/pm (0-11)	Number	0
h	Hour in am/pm (1-12)	Number	12
m	Minute in hour	Number	30
s	Second in minute	Number	55
S	Millisecond	Number	978
z	Time zone	General time zone	Pacific Standard Time; PST; GMT-08:00
Z	Time zone	RFC 822 time zone	-0800

Some samples:

.

Date and Time Pattern	Result
"yyyy.MM.dd G 'at' HH:mm:ss z"	2001.07.04 AD at 12:08:56 PDT
"EEE, MMM d, ''yy"	Wed, Jul 4, '01
"h:mm a"	12:08 PM
"hh 'o''clock' a, zzzz"	12 o'clock PM, Pacific Daylight Time
"K:mm a, z"	0:08 PM, PDT
"yyyyy.MMMMM.dd GGG hh:mm aaa"	02001.July.04 AD 12:08 PM
"EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z"	Wed, 4 Jul 2001 12:08:56 -0700
"yyMMddHHmmssZ"	010704120856-070

You can see how this could be quite helful in order to localize your dates (to European format for example). For further information on that topic, visit the source documentation at Java support pages.

I am the VP of User Experience at Lithium Technologies, and I have the privilege of announcing the upcoming redesign of Lithosphere.

What is new? Glad you asked. Simply: Our objectives have been recalibrated and the redesign will showcase them:

1. Demonstrate our customization capabilities
2. Improve the experience of our site
3. Insure that our community feels dynamic
4. Rebranding of our company and its services
5. Encourage more of your participation!

Lets go step by step on how we are going to accomplish this. Please come along:

1. Demonstrate our customization capabilities

As you may know, the biggest achievement from Lithium version 8.x to 9.0 has been the adoption of modern standards in the presentation layer of our communities. That is: Our front-end now features no tables and legacy markup, and instead, lots of semantic content and CSS-driven layout. In layman terms: Our content is completely detached and independent from our presentation... we are not shackled anymore by the platform and can now make anything with the later. And we intend to wow you indeed. Everything will be rethought: From a home page that provides more content hierarchy, form a global navigation that highlights what truly matters and hides what is not needed, to Blogs that feel like a platform for expression (not just a regurgitated forum), to Ideas and Forums that feel more clean and legible than ever before.

2. Improve the experience of our site

You will see that Forums, Ideas, Forums, Home page, all feel differentiated and customized to their purpose.

You will see that those links you rarely used are now gone to reduce noise, and those you always clicked on are more relevant are now more prominent, to increase signal.

You will see that the tools are more informative (like rollovers in Kudos) and that move out-of the way when not needed (like Message actions, that only appear when on rollover a particular message).

You will see that you will clearly recognize where you are at any given moment, that you instinctively will know what you afford to do, that you are aware where you came from and you will easily map the choices where you can go from there.

You will see Related content always cross-pollinating Forums, ideas and Blogs... So you can get the best out of each.

3. Insure that our community feels dynamic

We are holding a few surprises here, but you will soon enjoy real-time metrics on the activity and buzz of each page you are looking at (The "Pulse" of every post, analyzed for all to see!) You will discover a home page with a timeline of who is enjoying the same "Lithosphere moment" that you are, feeling more like an active community site with news feeds, recent activity, etc. Also, our blogs will feel more human, with a design that emphasizes the voice of our top authors. In general you will discover little details everywhere (some long requested by you) such as relative dates ("15 minutes ago" versus "03-11-2009 03:40 PM") to give you with a better sense of freshness and relevancy. Your profile will be more accessible, and the ability to see basic information of any community member will be instant with exciting rollover panels... But enough of this, we will let you discover the rest on your own.

4. Rebranding of our company and services

Lithium is not taking 2009 quietly. We are so proud of our new Lithium 9 engine and powerful new services such as Lithium Insights, that we want to celebrate it in a big way. Our logo still functions just fine, but our colors will go BOLD and confident. I warn some of you: It may take some time to digest... But the goal is to say something different out there, something that is both relevant and exciting (who said that usefulness had to be plain and boring?). We promise you excitement with a range of new colors that are not only refreshing, but navigationally informative: Giving you clear hints of where you are, framing that which requires your immediate attention or pushing to a second plane what is only contextual and supportive to your main task. We are also revamping our avatar collections to a more up-to-date design (more on that on a separate post).

5. Encourage more of your participation!

We are extremely thankful for the veterans that come here every day to participate, but for any new guests (send them our way!) we intend to welcome them into a site that is more clear to understand from the get-go on first approach: With a careful balance between data and editorial... With clear navigation and way-finding markings throughout the site. On each page there will be clear call to actions and these actions will be prominent and easy to understand.

In one word:  The new Lithosphere will pave the way with exciting ideas you will be able to recreate with your own communities.

[If you find this new dialogue on Community User Experience worthwhile, we will be back with more commentary and opinion on how to improve your own design efforts in community-building]