From: E S <eero.saynatkari@...>
Date: 2005-02-18T10:02:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Visual Identity Team

> L�hett�j�: 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 :/
> 
> 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