[EM] Intro to list (etc) - picking and unpicking

[Ernest Prabhakar]

Hi Rob,

On Oct 29, 2003, at 11:56 AM, Rob Brown wrote:

>> > Here is a UI I am working on for doing for ranking
>> > candidates:    http://weblogz.com/voting/2000pres.html
>>
>>  That way you could get rid of the notion of picking and unpicking 
>> since
>> every option would be somewhere on the ballot.
>
> I am not sure how to get rid of the notion of picking and unpicking 
> while maintaining an intuitive interface.  Note that picking all 
> candidates, in order from first choice to last choice, allows you to 
> automatically set their order without having to keep pressing the move 
> up and move down buttons.  I think having to use only the move up and 
> move down buttons would be much more tedious, and more influenced by 
> the ordering of candidates on the ballot.

I think this would be much clearer if you could do the picks as side-by 
side, rather than top-bottom.

Voted Candidates		Unvoted Candidates
^v #1 - A					B
^v #2 - D					C

That's a fairly common UI paradigm, and seems to convey the appropriate 
sense more efficiently. This also makes the meaning of up-down changes 
more explicit, as that direction is not overused for "picking."   You 
could even move to purely graphical buttons, so only the column titles 
need to be localized. Here's a nice applet example used for picking 
multiple time zones for a set of clocks:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/personalapplet.html

Another way to reduce the tedium of multiple up-downs -- if you have 
the UI flexibility -- is to have the rankings (#1, #2) be a popup.  So, 
I could select my number #4 pick, and choose that person to be #2 (with 
the other candidates flowing appropriately).   Of course, these means 
dynamically setting the popup to have the same number of options as 
candidates.

-- Ernie P.

P.S.  Very impressive JavaScript work!
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