User blog comment:Taldin/Some thoughts on redesigning the Boss/Quest Lists... Again/@comment-24150802-20151219221024/@comment-24150802-20151227110453

Here's the next version of the script that will produce content tables for quest pages (version 0.2 - reload if you don't see that number): http://oldgods.net/habitrpg/quest_table_creator.html

Here's a sample of the table it creates, showing all quests: http://habitica.wikia.com/wiki/User:LadyAlys/Sandbox

More suggestions are welcome.

The next stage (after handling suggestions), is to make the script produce multiple tables for the different pages we talked about (easy quests, hard quests, etc). I'll do that once we're sure we know what information we want in the tables. We can put different information on different pages.

In response to Taldin's comments just above here:

1) How hard is it to put the boss image in there, as a thumbnail?

Not too hard, but the table is already large. The boss images would be attractive, but not useful as far as I can see at the moment (tell me if there's a use I haven't thought of!)

2) Do you think we can split this into two smaller tables, perhaps? This one seems a bit on the wide side, and I'm thinking about how it'd look on mobile.  If not everything needs to be in the same table (Bosses vs. Quests) it might make things a little more manageble.

Technically, splitting it will be easy, but I'm not certain that will make it more usable on large screens. At the moment, you can filter or sort on all the fields to get a view that you want, showing all the data available. If we split it, we disadvantage those people whose needs aren't met by whatever criterion we choose for splitting.

At the moment, it's probably bad on mobile, but I don't want to disadvantage PC users for the sake of mobile users who would probably have a bad experience anyway even with a smaller table.

But I'm happy to talk about that more now that we have a wikia table to look at.

3) How important is that 'availability' column, in your opinion?  Most of them are 'permanent', and none of them except the World Bosses are 'finished'.

It is one of the less important columns, but if you're using the table to work out what quest to buy, you'd probably want that column. For example, if you're looking for an easy boss, you'd want to know if you're not able to buy Trapper Santa. But I'm open to removing that column. My main reason for including it was that it was in the existing table.

We could merge the availability and cost columns - they have very similar purposes.

4) Maybe we can drop the Rewards column (it's making the list tall and it wraps funny on my screen) and just leave it as Reward Type (gold, xp, pet, egg, scroll, gear, artifact) since they can click through the quest link to get the actual list.

It certainly does make the table tall, but I can see a use for it. If you're looking for the quest that gives you Cuttlefish pets, or a Golden potion (one of my requirements), then you'd want it. We could certainly shrink some of those cells. For example, the World Boss cells could just say "food" and the equipment names could perhaps be replaced by images (but you might want to search by gear name, so perhaps not). At the moment, that entire column is created automatically from the website's quest configuration files, but I can change the code to customise it.

We could also merge the reward items and reward types columns if we didn't want to do filtering on the reward type column (we'd be able to sort the merged reward column by the same data that you can currently see in the reward type column).