There would be a slider that followed the blue line when dragged by a mouse (or arrows for people like me who do not use a mouse). A horizontal or vertical drag would result in the same action of the slider along the blue line. The chart could be labeled with numbers on the x and y axis, and the stripes in the chart could represent various "human interpretations" of the project like "very incomplete", "confusing", "has potential", "will take over the world".
Maybe that will all be too complicated in the end, but even without it, I kinda like the chart. It helps me understand that as I move the slider, my extreme opinions will carry more wieght than my more moderate ones.
The whole point is to avoid pidgen holing the user, and the data, into a system like this:
http://www.babynamewizard.com/namipedia/boy/kris
( Feel free to push all the sliders on that page all the way to the right )
Friday, April 10, 2009
A More Thoughtful Voting Tool
The Chocolate Factory project out of Mozilla Labs has really captured my imagination lately. Open source design in software is obviously something I'm really passionate about, and something that has not been done very successfully yet. The Chocolate Factory is a bold experiment to bring some high level thinking in open source design down to earth. And that is really exciting!
One of the most important tools within this project will be the voting or rating system used to collaboratively advance the best projects through a development cycle. Because of the importance of this tool, and the lack of any good implementation examples out in the real world, it has been a little tricky to get right.
Yesterday, Pascal Finette, a lead on Chocolate Factory, came accross a new idea for voting that keeps it simple, gives good user feedback via the UI, and generates some meaningful data for number crunching on the back end.
I really liked it, but this morning I had another thought that extends it. There is really nothing very different about it, except by adding a chart as a backdrop, the UI presents a canvas for more meaningful feadback to the user.
There would be a slider that followed the blue line when dragged by a mouse (or arrows for people like me who do not use a mouse). A horizontal or vertical drag would result in the same action of the slider along the blue line. The chart could be labeled with numbers on the x and y axis, and the stripes in the chart could represent various "human interpretations" of the project like "very incomplete", "confusing", "has potential", "will take over the world".
Maybe that will all be too complicated in the end, but even without it, I kinda like the chart. It helps me understand that as I move the slider, my extreme opinions will carry more wieght than my more moderate ones.
The whole point is to avoid pidgen holing the user, and the data, into a system like this:
http://www.babynamewizard.com/namipedia/boy/kris
( Feel free to push all the sliders on that page all the way to the right )
There would be a slider that followed the blue line when dragged by a mouse (or arrows for people like me who do not use a mouse). A horizontal or vertical drag would result in the same action of the slider along the blue line. The chart could be labeled with numbers on the x and y axis, and the stripes in the chart could represent various "human interpretations" of the project like "very incomplete", "confusing", "has potential", "will take over the world".
Maybe that will all be too complicated in the end, but even without it, I kinda like the chart. It helps me understand that as I move the slider, my extreme opinions will carry more wieght than my more moderate ones.
The whole point is to avoid pidgen holing the user, and the data, into a system like this:
http://www.babynamewizard.com/namipedia/boy/kris
( Feel free to push all the sliders on that page all the way to the right )
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