[EM] Intro to list (etc) - picking UI

[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.    In effect, you are separating the act of 
'voting' from that of 'ranking'.  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

The ideal would be the ability to directly drag items within the list, 
but that may be too much for JavaScript.
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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