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Subject: 
Re: Article scoring
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Thu, 9 Mar 2000 19:39:47 GMT
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In lugnet.admin.general, Steve Bliss writes:
OH!  Yes, radio buttons.  When the number of choices is small, maybe that's
the way to go.

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 O

It wouldn't slide (ie, you couldn't hold down the mouse button, and drag
between buttons), but it would be visually close.

That would rock!!


I don't know how 'heavy' this approach would be, in terms of page size.

I don't think the HTML would be too heavy, but it could get pretty nasty on
the web browser (depending on how many buttons there were per article).  I
seem to remember the Fibblesnork LEGO Survey pages (which each have out 100
radio buttons) taking a really really long time to display on non-beefy
machines, and even crashing older browsers from the memory usage in Win32.
But this would probably only be a potential problem for pages with multiple
articles per page -- i.e., huge threads or long full-view ranges.


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?
I think MSIE works like NN.  But I'm far from being an expert.

I was pleasntly surprised to discover last year that they both were smart
enough to make the Tab key bind the radio button and text together in Win32
automatically if there's no intervening foofoo, but I now I can't recall
what that foofoo was.  I think it had to be regular text and not a tag, or
something like that.  It was tricky to get the tabbing to work right for
Win32 on the member sign-in page:

   http://www.lugnet.com/people/members/sign-in/

(Tab key doesn't work the way it should in NN for Linux.  :-(


[...]
That may be a problem -- people looking at message scores may interpret
near-0 scores as bad, rather than neutral.

Hadn't thought of that.  Hrmmmm.


I think that is an issue to resolve with user education, via clear labeling.

I was hoping the explicit + sign on numbers might help.  +21, +83, +7, etc.
By the time it's obvious to someone that the numbers go up to +90 and above,
they've already seen a couple -20's, etc.?

OTOH, making the range "0" to "100" instead of "-100" to "+100" would nicely
eliminate the need for the positive/negative sign!


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?

Not necessarily.  It's logical, but people are used to things being
rated starting at 0.  Then again, people are not used to having combined
'good' and 'bad' ratings.  Usually, ratings indicate *either* how 'good' or
'bad' something is, not both.

Well, if you grow up in Minnesota, yer usta hearing temperatures like "minus
forty" (bad) and "ten above" (good).   :-)

Most movie rating scales are what?--  0 to 4, or 0 to 5, sometimes with 1/2's?

Then there's the two-thumbs-up (+2) and the two-thumbs-down (-2).

(I get a big bang out of Mr. Cranky's[1] inverted scale, BTW...  :-)


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.  :)

And the midpoint.  Establishing that mid-range is a neutral stance is an
important feature of the system.

OK, ya, good point!


But I think Dan is right - avoid numbers altogether.  And avoiding
numbers also means that voters would have less trouble accepting the
score they see after they cast their vote.  Since the entire
votes->score transformation becomes a magic black box, they don't have
to worry about why casting +100 as the first vote turns into a score of
only 50.  Provide the details (somewhere) for anyone who wants to read
it, but don't put it on the voting page.

Me likee.  Could even have as few as 7 or 9 radio buttons.

--Todd


[1] http://www.mrcranky.com/



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: Article scoring
 
(...) OK, a couple of more thoughts on the [-100,+100] vs. [0,100] choice... I'm finding it increasingly difficult to defend the position of [-100,+100] due to a number of reasons. One which I don't think came up yet is how a new or casual user (...) (24 years ago, 10-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  
  Re: Article scoring
 
(...) OK, looks like this is going to work great! On the screen, it's looking much cleaner than what I had before with the drop-down list. A not-too-big-yet-not-to-small number of radio buttons with a neat numeric spread is 6, which yields the (...) (24 years ago, 13-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)  

Message is in Reply To:
  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)  

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