Ruby Visual Identity Team

ruby-talk
1

Lähettäjä: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@neurogami.com>
Aihe: Re: Ruby Visual Identity Team

gabriele renzi wrote:
> James Britt ha scritto:
>
>
>
>> Each box shows resources culled from links posted to del.icio.us.
>> Clicking the resource name just loads that page. Clicking the little
>> 'i' next to a resource shows you what people have posted it and their
>> extended comments. A modern browser is required. Haven't tested in
>> older browsers (or even many current ones), so field reports are
>> welcome so that it degrades nicely
>
>
> (my two cents)
> the [i] button is interesting, but It is not that obvious to me what it
> does, I wonder if there is a way of making it more clear :confused:

Good question. The intent was to provide a way to render some metadata
about each link; link title themselves are not always properly
descriptive, yet people should not have to go click a link and load
another page just to see that it isn't what they thought.

The tricky part is providing enough information to a new user as to what
that little icon is for without that same information just getting in
the way once a user is no longer new. Maybe mouse-over pop-up help.
Something, anyway.

Anecdotally, a white 'i' on a blue background is generally recognized
as an 'information' section, though it has to be large enough to be
clear, generally I'd say 12-14px should be adequate. To give it a
longer label, you'd use title:

&lt;a title="Information about this item"&gt;...

> Also, the boxes have too many elements, imo. Once you provided a nice
> search/faceted browsing interface, you should not need all those
> articles in the home.

Hm. Partly I wanted to have a set of boxes that showed either the 10
top-rated (e.g. most mentioned on delicious, or whatever the criteria
is) or the 10 newest. Maybe 5 or 7 is better. Browsing by tag/topic is
done from the 'browse' page; each box would have a browse link as well
that took you to that browse page, preloading the search criteria for
tags that map to that category.

But the matter of clutter is certainly something to watch for; part of
me thinks that simple links to predefined facet browsing might be
better. (With sufficient JavaScript the boxes could be collapsible as
well, I suppose, by default showing only topic titles linking to a full
browsing page.)

>
> Btw, I'd globally prefer listing some latest link (like in current
> ruby-doc) and provide browsing links based on the (meta)tags

That's an option, but that could also be obtained via an RSS feed. I
might be wrong, but I think fewer and fewer people are getting news and
site updates by actually going to the site in question.

James

E

2

E S wrote:

Anecdotally, a white 'i' on a blue background is generally recognized
as an 'information' section, though it has to be large enough to be
clear, generally I'd say 12-14px should be adequate. To give it a longer label, you'd use title:

&lt;a title="Information about this item"&gt;...

I may do that. If you don't know what that icon is for, you'll want to see something that tells you. But once you know, you'll probably never want to see that bit if help again. The title stuff might hit the sweet spot.

James