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

Dave Ketchum davek at clarityconnect.com
Thu Oct 30 10:54:02 PST 2003


I recommend that you ignore what I read here (the time zone reference is
interesting, but you are doing a different problem, and do not need the
restrictions that would go with side by side names).

I like your present display.

Instructions that would match your present display:
       Pick the choices in order, starting with the one you like best and
doing as many as you choose to (this is consistent with Condorcet
philosophy, and should lead to minimum effort for most voters).
       If you feel need to change the order, use the move up, move down,
and unpick buttons - during or after your picking.

A thought:  A version identity in the primary page would help all keep
straight whether they are looking at the same version.

Something fixable?  While looking at the voting display I wandered off to
do the time zone display.  When I came back, voting had forgotten what I
had done.  Yahoo! pages (at least some of them) are smart enough to
continue from where they left off after similar interruptions.

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 13:56:18 -0800 Ernest Prabhakar wrote:

 > 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.

-- 
   davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
   Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
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