After saving a comment, tell the user what to do

[konklone]

To reproduce:

• Write a comment
• Click "Save response"

What happens:

• A bold piece of text appears below saying "Your comment was saved."
• Nothing else occurs. The filled-out form and response buttons are left unchanged.

What should happen:

• The comment form is closed, and the user is taken back to what they were reading beforehand. The "Your comment was saved." indication appears somewhere on that screen (perhaps as a flash alert or in some reserved space).
• Alternatively, the comment form is cleared and disappears, and the user is shown a more spare white space that says the comment was saved with a link or button they can click to return to reading what they were reading before they commented.
• Alternatively, the most minimal possible thing I can think of is that the comment form is cleared of text (so it doesn't look like an unsaved form), the "Save response" button is disabled (to prevent further duplicate submissions), and the "Your comment was saved." text is updated to something like "Your comment was saved. Go back to the regulation." where the second sentence is a link that, when clicked, takes the user back to where they were before they made the comment.

I gave a few suggestions above, but it all boils down to a suggestion that when the comment is saved, give the user a clear next step. I was very confused when I saved the comment and got the text, but the form remained filled out and I was not given an instruction of what to do next.

[konklone]

I'm now noticing that saving the comment didn't actually submit the comment. I see this now:

I assumed that when my comment was saved, it was submitted to the EPA. It's worth putting this in context of my request above -- after the comment is saved, if there are further actions the user needs to take in order to get their comment to the EPA, I strongly encourage the platform to make it very explicit.

[jehlers]

Thanks @konklone for the feedback. Definitely something for us to keep an eye on as we do research through the open comment period.

Based on our user research, many commenters (especially those who will be commenting on the rule we're piloting) do not just write one comment. They normally write 50-100 page reports as their comments. This system was created to accommodate both use cases (the single comment submission vs building a larger comment full of many comments smaller issues/comments - happy to talk more about this at some point). I do, however, agree and see your point that we should be as explicit as possible no matter who the user is.