New UI Experiments

[Doug Kaye]

I've been working on some new UI concepts for SpokenWord.org. Compare
these two Feed pages:

http://www.spokenword.org/feed/1 (old)
http://www.spokenword.org/feed2/1 (new)

The goal is to take what's good from other aggregators such as iTunes
(a tabular view) but adapt it to what's unique about the
SpokenWord.org database. Rather than tell you how it works, I'll let
you play around with it and figure it out for yourself. Still to come
are two more tabs: (1) Subscribers, listing all those who subscribe to
the feed, and (2) Edit/Tag, where you can edit metadata and add/remove/
edit tags for the feed.

I picked /feed as the place to start because it's not as complex as
the Collection page, which will have to include an extra level of
hierarchy, but it has most of the critical features. For those who
care, this is based on YUI, Yahoo's UI toolkit.

You can use it to display the details of any feed by changing /feed
to /feed2 in the URL.

Do you find this more useful? How could it be made even more useful?

Thanks again for your input.

...doug

Doug Kaye, Executive Director
The Conversations Network
A 501(c)(3) Non-Profit
do...@rds.com
v: 415.868.5461
twitter: dougkaye
facebook.com/doug.kaye

[Paul Bearne]

Hi Doug

yes the new one is better

I don't like the the RSS link where there are it breaks the page-flow. They would look better in the box on the right either as column on to the right or if this causes space problems add tab's to to the box and style up the tab in RSS orange with RSS Logo and text

look at right aligning the scan report as this is a tool/information not feed details this would allow you to add other tabs like a list all the user that have collected this or from this the must collected track etc..

Paul

Paul Bearne
http://www.bearne.com

[Ken Kennedy]

I like the new one, Doug, but a way to see the program notes would be useful; I do review them, especially when I'm checking out a new feed, and having to click in to each program to see them would add a lot of steps. Maybe a hover-over-program-and-notes-popup type widget, ala Netflix?

--
Ken Kennedy
Contact info: http://kenzoid.com/me/contact

[Jon Udell]

Love it!

> How could it be made even more useful?

1. Show me a reasonable default set of columns in a way that doesn't
require horizontal scroll.

2. Provide a Show All Columns link that expands to your current default.

- Jon

[Doug Kaye]

There's an interesting tradeoff using the YUI DataTable widget. Right now, you see a select set of columns, but they all auto-resize according to the content. So if you're looking at a list with long titles, the other columns are pushed into the out-of-window area. The alternative is to set default column widths in order to guarantee that certain columns always appear, but that will probably truncate some titles. The columns are resizeable, but the question is what's the best default: (a) always show the full title and run the risk of losing columns to the scrolled area, or (b) possibly truncate the titles to avoid default scrolling.

     ...doug

[Jon Udell]

I vote for b).

[Bill Kempthorne]

What I found 

- Much cleaner look, very nice

- click to get program description a little counter intuitive, disclosure triangles clutter so much - thinking of alternative, Ken's comment about a hover (dump program descriptions into a Drupal Glossary) might be the most clean to the interface but then I would almost do the mini 'i' in the corner like the dashboard widget which would activate on mouseover. 

- Love the player, couldn't get how to add to the attached playlist or what the crosshair icon was for

- Like the rating right beside the program, one of the limitation of ITC was not finding an easy way to rate multiple programs outside of the playlist

- Column are dragable - nice, no sort by column?

- medium (media type) word vs icon. Icon woud give it the iTunes flavor, narrow column width

In larger feeds, thinking I'm going to classify as must listen, maybe listen, never listen - so should there be a way to show/hide/ignore items I've heard or never intend to listen to.

Would this work for multiple subscribed feeds?

--
Bill Kempthorne
bi...@maxwest.net

--
Bill Kempthorne
bi...@maxwest.net

[Doug Kaye]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 5:06 PM, Bill Kempthorne <bkemp...@gmail.com> wrote:

- Love the player, couldn't get how to add to the attached playlist or what the crosshair icon was for

The playlist is merely a list of all the MP3 programs on the current page. You can't control it. You can, however, add programs to your collection by adding to your own collection. (I may just disable the playlist view in the player. It's confusing.)
 

- Column are dragable - nice, no sort by column?

Because we have feeds with up to 30,000 programs, we can't use the client/browser for paging and sorting. It has to be done on the server. And because many of the column values are in separate tables, we can't sort by many of those values. We *may* be able to offer sorting by some columns. Woring on that.
 

In larger feeds, thinking I'm going to classify as must listen, maybe listen, never listen - so should there be a way to show/hide/ignore items I've heard or never intend to listen to.

You've got *some* of that with the colored lights: Never collected, currently collected, previously collected.
 

Would this work for multiple subscribed feeds?

I don't understand the question. This display shows any/all feeds in the database regardless of what you're subscribed to. If you're subscribed to the feed, there's an asterisk immediately below the feed's thubmail near the top of the page.

Keeping the clutter down is the most difficult challenge, but let me know if some of the more subtle indicators are too subtle such as the asterisk for "you subscribe" or the colored lights. This is about the fourth version of this page over the past year, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

Thanks.

   ...doug