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I am building a news feed and I thought of changing the location of the comments to be on the side. Besides Medium that does it more for footnotes, I didn't see a website that has real discussions on the right side of the post instead of the bottom. Especially in the newsfeed itself.

For me it looks readable and intuitive, but I want to be sure I am not breaking any UX rule.

Here's an image:

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When clicking on the comments icon, the post shifts to the left and the comments column fades in quickly from the right.

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3 Answers 3

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This is a content strategy issue.

The question is: what is that content?

On a lot of media sites, the comments are horrific content. Typically argumentative, factually suspect, poorly written, and for the most part, damage the actual content on the page rather than enhance it.

In many cases, the comments aren't there to enhance the content in any way. They are merely there to generate clicks. They want people to keep coming back to post their next argument to increase page views.

As such, in that situation, it probably makes sense to bury the comments at the bottom...and is the likely reason most sites do this.

On the other hand, if you have excellent content and are attracting excellent commentators who post excellent comments, go for it! Highlight them by putting them up there at the 'same level' as the page content.

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  • I understand your opinion. Comments are super important and I aim for high quality content so my intention is to emphasize comments. But reading @tristanlabbe comment below it contradicts your claim. Any thoughts? Because this argument was exactly in my head when designing this.
    – hrr
    Commented Apr 1, 2014 at 19:03
  • I don't think tristanlabbe's answer contradicts per se. I think tristanlabbe is talking more about visual relations between them, where I'm talking a bit more about quality of content.
    – DA01
    Commented Apr 1, 2014 at 19:06
  • Ok, and regarding the visuals attached in the wuestion. Do you think it follows your answer? Or tristanlabbe's?
    – hrr
    Commented Apr 2, 2014 at 7:02
  • My answer isn't about visuals--but rather about content. I can't judge the quality of the comments on your web site. That'd be up to you.
    – DA01
    Commented Apr 2, 2014 at 15:34
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It can be a very good idea as long as you don't consider your comments to be a very relevant part of the content. In your example the second news block is centered, which feels weird and breaks the reading flow. I think a news feed needs to be quickly scannable when you scroll through it. So keeping the Comments Block even if it's empty would keep a consistent width which is better for the reading flow.

Scrolling through a lot of comments in a tiny space can also be very annoying. This could happen if a news is very short.

Finally, the mobile state probably need your comments to appear below the News block, which will require you to overwrite a bunch of CSS rules. This is added work for something that could be a lot simpler.

So I'd say that having comments on the side requires a specific context in which comments are never very long and not so relevant to work well. In this case it can be a nice new way to do it!

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some people aren't interested in comments in the first place, so showing it always isn't a good idea when they want to focus on the content itself and the design waste some space for comments on the side, make sure that "all" your customer "always" care about people's comments

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