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 Administrative / General / 5002
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Subject: 
Re: Article scoring
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Wed, 8 Mar 2000 22:08:28 GMT
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In lugnet.admin.general, Steve Bliss writes:
OK, now for the *actual* user interface.  A slider which glides between
-100 and +100 would be perfect, but that's not part of HTML forms, so it
has to be a drop-down list box with a few choices.  (A fill-in-the-box
might kinda work, but that's prolly too much work for the user.)

How about radio buttons instead of a drop-down list?  Seems more
approachable for the non-geeks among us.

OH!  Yes, radio buttons.  When the number of choices is small, maybe that's
the way to go.

OTOH, radio buttons in GUI web browsers are smaller "targets" than list boxes.
Does MSIE know how to automagically group text associated with a radio button?
Or, like NN, does MSIE make the user click _exactly_ on the radio button
circle itself rather than sloppy pointing on the text?

The one-click nature of radio buttons probably makes up for that shortcoming,
though, huh?


I'm weary of 33's and 66's because they don't seem "round" enough, so what
I've got now in the test thingie is the 6 values of +100, +75, +50, +25,
-25, -50, -75, and -100.  (0 is also a list item, but it means "I don't
care" or "erase my earlier vote" and displays as three dashes).

You could let people choose a score from 1 to 10.  This is very
intuitive, at least for us Michiganders--I can't speak for the rest of
the world.

Hmm, there could be a couple of sticky problems with that:

First, the magnitude:  The range 1-10 is great for casting quick votes, but
isn't quite expressive enough for showing final scores.  It'd have to go to
decimal expansions to show the difference between, say, an 8.743 and a 9.311,
which would both show as "9".  And, most importantly, it's too easy to get a
"10" -- all it would take is 19 votes of 10 and 1 vote of 0.  (19/20 => 9.5
=> "10").

Second, the midpoint:  Although the midpoint of [1,10] is 5.5, non-geeks
may be likely to think of 5 as the halfway point.  But even a range [0,10]
where 5 *is* the midpoint (or [0,100] where 50 is the midpoint) doesn't
communicate negativity...  If the scale is [0,100] with 100 being the best
and 0 being the worst, doesn't a 0 sound like "no value" rather than "negative
value"?  I think there's a lot to be said for being able to mark thigs like
unnecessary flames, trolls, filth, and other stuff like that to be of
"negative value" rather than, at worst, only "no value."  In other words,
a score of -5 (or -50) on a scale of [-10,+10] (or [-100,+100]) much more
accurately communicates negativity than does the equivalent score of 2.5
(or 25) on a scale of [0,10] (or [0,100]), yes?


I don't know how to avoid judgment words like "good" and "bad" and still
have the labels "make quick sense."  Any suggestions?

Having a '1 to 10' UI would let you avoid the labels.

Well, except the endpoints -- they'd still prolly need to be labeled.  :)

--Todd



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: Article scoring
 
(...) IIRC, from my days of dabbling with java, you could make a radiobox, and make the lable to it a link with no HREF, just with a ONCLICK java script thing, that will select the appropriate radio button. Will that work? (...) The thing is, if (...) (24 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
  Re: Article scoring
 
(...) Hmm. Thinking back to the desired slider interface, you could put a good number of radio buttons horizontally across a page. The voter could click in the desired range. Something like: Very Bad Neutral Very Good O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O (...) (24 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Article scoring
 
(...) (hey, anything to help out) [snipped all the stuff I agree with] (...) How about radio buttons instead of a drop-down list? Seems more approachable for the non-geeks among us. (...) You could let people choose a score from 1 to 10. This is (...) (24 years ago, 8-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  

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