After using the new system for a couple of days, I now believe that a single-click[1] system, like the one Duncan describes, would probably be preferable for interaction efficiency / satisfaction reasons. (Having to click on two different UI widgets in two different screen locations—i.e., mouse move, click, another mouse move, click—is an annoyance.)
One downside of Duncan’s proposed widget design would be that it cannot accommodate the full range of currently permissible input values. The current two-widget system has 25 possible states (karma and agreement can each independently take on any of five values: ++, +, 0, −, −−), while the proposed “blue and orange compass rose” single-widget system has only 9 possible states (the neutral state, plus two strengths of vote × four directions).
It is not immediately obvious to me what an ideal solution would look like. The obvious solution (in terms of interaction design) would be to construct a mapping from the 25 states to the 9, wherein some of the 25 currently available input states should be impermissible, and some sets of the remainder of the 25 should each be collapsed into one of the 9 input states of the proposed widget. (I haven’t thought about the problem enough to know if a satisfactory such mapping exists.)
Or, to be more precise, a “single-click / double-click / click-and-hold, depending on implementation details and desired outcome, but in all cases a pointer interaction with only one UI widget in one location on the screen” system.
Hypothetically, you could represent all of the states by using the diamond, but adding a second ‘diamond’ or ‘shell’ around it, and making all of the vertexes and regions clickable. To express a +/+ you click in the upper right region; to express ++/++, the uppermost right region; to express 0/++, you click on the right-most tip; to express ++/0, you click on the bottom tip; and so on. The regions can be colored. (And for users who don’t get strong votes, it degrades nicely: you should omit the outer shell corresponding to the strong votes.) I’m sure I’ve seen this before in video games or something, but I’m not sure where or what it may be called (various search queries for ‘diamond’ don’t pull up anything relevant). It’s a bit like a radar chart, but discretized.
This would be easy to use (as long as the vertexes have big hit boxes) since you make only 1 click (rather than needing to click 4 times or hold long twice for a ++/++) and use the mouse to choose what the pair is (which is a good use of mice), and could be implemented even as far back as Web 1.0 with imagemaps, but somewhat hard to explain—however, that’s what tooltips are for, and this is for power-users in the first place, so some learning curve is tolerable.
After using the new system for a couple of days, I now believe that a single-click[1] system, like the one Duncan describes, would probably be preferable for interaction efficiency / satisfaction reasons. (Having to click on two different UI widgets in two different screen locations—i.e., mouse move, click, another mouse move, click—is an annoyance.)
One downside of Duncan’s proposed widget design would be that it cannot accommodate the full range of currently permissible input values. The current two-widget system has 25 possible states (karma and agreement can each independently take on any of five values: ++, +, 0, −, −−), while the proposed “blue and orange compass rose” single-widget system has only 9 possible states (the neutral state, plus two strengths of vote × four directions).
It is not immediately obvious to me what an ideal solution would look like. The obvious solution (in terms of interaction design) would be to construct a mapping from the 25 states to the 9, wherein some of the 25 currently available input states should be impermissible, and some sets of the remainder of the 25 should each be collapsed into one of the 9 input states of the proposed widget. (I haven’t thought about the problem enough to know if a satisfactory such mapping exists.)
Or, to be more precise, a “single-click / double-click / click-and-hold, depending on implementation details and desired outcome, but in all cases a pointer interaction with only one UI widget in one location on the screen” system.
Hypothetically, you could represent all of the states by using the diamond, but adding a second ‘diamond’ or ‘shell’ around it, and making all of the vertexes and regions clickable. To express a +/+ you click in the upper right region; to express ++/++, the uppermost right region; to express 0/++, you click on the right-most tip; to express ++/0, you click on the bottom tip; and so on. The regions can be colored. (And for users who don’t get strong votes, it degrades nicely: you should omit the outer shell corresponding to the strong votes.) I’m sure I’ve seen this before in video games or something, but I’m not sure where or what it may be called (various search queries for ‘diamond’ don’t pull up anything relevant). It’s a bit like a radar chart, but discretized.
This would be easy to use (as long as the vertexes have big hit boxes) since you make only 1 click (rather than needing to click 4 times or hold long twice for a ++/++) and use the mouse to choose what the pair is (which is a good use of mice), and could be implemented even as far back as Web 1.0 with imagemaps, but somewhat hard to explain—however, that’s what tooltips are for, and this is for power-users in the first place, so some learning curve is tolerable.