Common list of methods/tasks
Closed this issue · 9 comments
When looking here: http://18.190.41.255/Methods or http://18.190.41.255/Task there is a tab for common methods
I would suggest not having that and only listing popular and alphabetical, as defining what is "common" is nebulous and implies some editorialization on our part.
"Common" in this case literally means, "ranked in descending order by count of submissions associated with them in our database." Is the term still nebulous or loaded?
Ah, that's what I would have thought popular was. Is "popular" is then submissions that are more popular grouped by method? The way I was thinking was that since this was the methods page the tab descriptors refer to the methods not the submissions. Anyway not a big deal then, could be nice to just describe the sorting method right above the list of methods in the tab.
I understand your confusion. "Popular" actually aggregates the total up-vote count for all submissions referenced by a task, method, or tag, respective to those view, and sorts in descending order of up-votes, by the way.
I think this is too subtle, because both you and Vincent have been confused by this, now: each tab sorts in descending order of the numbers in parentheses toward the right of the link. The meaning of these numbers is given in the bold heading at the top of the list, also in parentheses, (like "Submission Count," or "Up-vote Count").
With two team members confused, I think we need to amend this to make it clearer. I'm thinking about how.
@willzeng Related to discussion on unitaryfund/metriq-app#111, both Sarah and Vincent have been confused by the labeling and design of this view, now. I say we just make it look more like the homepage, which has more useful information and a more visually-appealing design. I'm drafting something, now, and it won't take long.
@vprusso, @crazy4pi314, Please take a look at what I have for the tasks index page right now, on QA:
Is this less confusing? Does this make the sorting type tabs a little less conceptually opaque?
That helps yeah, How hard is it do something like a pivot table? you can click the column heading to sort by likes, submission count, etc?
There are 3 fields in the table; the 3 tabs sort by all three, respectively. The only common sorting feature we don't already offer is reverse ordering, in that case.
Table sorting is one of the most commonly implemented web UI features, period. Ironically, though, I can't think of many times that I come across a tabulated web view casually. It's common, or even a standard, to make clicking on header elements toggle between ascending and descending sort by a table column. However, I prefer the tabs. The reason I prefer the tabs, is that there's immediate, unambiguous indication to the user that they can sort at all, in a totally uncomplicated way, whereas many people won't necessarily see a web table and think to try manipulating it as if it were Excel, for example. (Some designers or engineers might object to my point, about precedent of decades of spreadsheet-like functionality not being assumed by the user. The point is, we have it, though, in the most obvious, "pretty" way I can think to indicate it to users.)
Also, these lists could be arbitrarily long; the user doesn't have to remember header columns at all, from deep within the middle of the list, since the column definitions are neatly self-contained within each row, with the layout currently on QA. There's no fumbling with ascending/descending, when the user is going to want ascending lexigraphical and descending count sorts most of the time, unless they literally want the single least popular item on the site, still easily accessible by dragging the window scroll to flush with the bottom.
This can definitely still be improved, and let's discuss how, but I'm personally 10 times happier already with these 2 index views, for the changes made yesterday.
Sounds good @WrathfulSpatula, it wasn't a super strong position, I happen to prefer ecommerce like interfaces where I can do basic filtering and sorting to find what I want. I'm cool with the tabs (not that many things to sort by anyway as you say). I thought you had a description at the top of the panes you can tab through that described the sorting method? It seems to have gone away...or maybe I am imaging things :P
Somewhat tangentially, I think https://scirate.com/ can be another site that could be good to find inspiration from, since it is one that many of our potential academic users would be familiar with. Source is here: https://github.com/scirate/scirate
I just sneaked sorting description headers back into the views, so that we can consider this closed. (They weren't exactly in there before, in the same form, but this way makes enough sense.)