It's your fault Dave for agreeing with me.

snapster posted a pic said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 11:08am ET

Project brenner was/is the mediocre forum construction. We wanted to wrap it up and move on to other infrastructure but agreed on a final push to add the categorization feature. My main use case at the time was "the need to exclude miscellaneous chatter we were creating from any more focused business stuff"

I argued @dave and @shawn away from a conventional "click to exclusively see a category" UI and into the existing "click to exclude that category" list we have at the top of the forums. Actually the conversation was a bit more complicated as it took me a while to understand that it couldn't easily work both ways (i.e. both as a means to single click exclude a category and a means to single click exclusively view a category).

THIS THING HERE:

Now I find myself always desiring the opposite use case. The etc. category isn't particularly annoying to me (so I don't need to exclude it) but I'd like to check in on a single category at a time to make sure I'm not missing anything. Unfortunately my stupid CEO demand was listened to and now I don't like it. I have to click too many times to see a single category. Who designed this crap!

Ultimately a UI that could do both functions with a single click would be awesome, but I'm told and generally understand how weird that sort of thing might be to figure out.

Having used it this way for a while does anyone have input on how the forum category selection UI works?

10 comments, 11 replies
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barnabee said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 12:14pm ET:

Huh?

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- heh, TL:DR I guess. I added a picture of the category selector thing.
  
  snapster said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 12:33pm ET
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- Ahh, the selector thing. Of course!
  
  barnabee said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 12:48pm ET
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shawn said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 1:59pm ET:

Here's a thought... would anyone miss that category selection if it wasn't there anymore? I'm inclined just to remove the thing and bring a modified version back when we have real big city problems to deal with.

I say this because the number of pageviews where someone clicked a category is way low, like in the 10's of pageviews per day range.

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- Or have another button that says ALL or EXCLUDE ALL. AND! another button that says all but and then list all of those categories. MORE!!!!
  
  capguncowboy said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 2:17pm ET
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snapster said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 2:37pm ET:

@shawn no one uses it because it is too hard to use :)

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Thumperchick said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 3:28pm ET:

Is it possible to make the category names themselves into a link that opens a view of just that category in a new tab?

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- are you suggesting Circle click does one thing, Wordlink does another?
  
  snapster said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 3:44pm ET
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- Yes. If you are savvy enough to want to use those controls, I don't see why that would be an issue.
  
  Thumperchick said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 3:59pm ET
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- @thumperchick I think I agree but it's a slippery slope to do unexpected UI things and I'm ok not pushing envelope for this.
  
  snapster said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 8:01pm ET
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shawn said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 4:00pm ET:

Rather than work in a "told you so" comment I just went ahead and changed the category selector to make more sense. I like this version much better :)

#bias-for-snark

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- Well, that just... works. Default zero = all categories, and if you want to select one or two, you can. Nice quick fix.
  
  Thumperchick said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 4:07pm ET
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- I thought it would be more difficult to do that. Probably because I don't code.
  
  Thumperchick said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 4:08pm ET
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snapster said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 4:50pm ET:

@shawn thanks for changing. Likely was confusing/boring to air it out here but I wanted to make sure I wasn't wrong about being wrong before flip flopping. I am happy to be wrong!

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BillLehecka said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 4:52pm ET:

Don't blame me... I voted for Kodos!

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catbird said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 5:08pm ET:

Speaking as a UX designer, I want to tell you that the thing you have just implemented makes my brain hurt...

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- I'm not a UX designer or a designer or any kind and it makes my brain hurt.
  
  ceagee said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 10:13pm ET
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RedHot said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 5:24pm ET:

@shawn, Why not just keep it the way it was and add a "toggle all" button. Then you can either select the catagory you want left out or toggle everything to be excluded then turn off the toggle button for the catagory(ies) you'd like to see?

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catbird said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 5:32pm ET:

Speaking as a UX designer, I want to tell you that the thing you have just implemented makes my brain hurt!

Just do this:

CATEGORIES: ALL (selected by default) | EXPERIMENTS | ECOMMERCE | MEDIOCRE META | ETC

Please to get rid of the combination radio button/checkbox... just use simple styling on the text to differentiate selected state vs. off state...

Use Case: "I want to see everything" = default, no action required
Use Case: "I want to only see category X" = one click on Category X
Use Case: "I want to see everything EXCEPT that category Y" = sorry, outlier use case, brah

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- Yeah, I can see it being a bit odd as-is. We'll think on it a bit, but I like your suggestion.
  
  dave said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 5:39pm ET
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- to be clear, we arrived at this mess by following my demand that your outlier use case was the focus (all were originally shown as clicked)
  
  snapster said Tue, Dec 10th 2013 at 8:05pm ET
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