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Sorting in a paged list (as seen on most web pages) isn't very useful unless you intend to page through the whole list. If you're only going to look at one page

Sorting in a paged list (as seen on most web pages) isn't very useful unless you intend to page through the whole list. If you're only going to look at one page, you're probably better off with a search for the attribute(s) you're looking for rather than trying to find a sort that puts those results up top. Developers love to put in sort controls because they cover lots of use cases and don't take a lot of thought to implement. And mentally, they tend to think about sorting a lot anyway. But my experience with looking at data from non-developer users has always been that they rarely use sort options when available (and search filters, either, btw. ) You see about 5% of users employing those controls. So the developers think they've solved certain use cases by providing sorting, and users don't see those cases as covered, because they don't see that they can use sort to solve them. It's better to just not put in sort, reduce complexity and find other ways to cover those cases that users are more likely to employ.

jcampbell1 15y ago
I am quite sure you have fallen into the Google group think of no sorting + no folders. Every time someone at google has the balls to challenge that dogma, like replacing "add label" with "move to" in Gmail, correct usage soars. The search & labels only fallacy has led to some terrible interfaces, such as the Google Docs home page.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  I'm quite sure you're wrong on that, since I know exactly how we reached that conclusion despite originally thinking otherwise. I worked on the issue at another major net company where we were dealing with a _lot_ of lists being viewed by very large numbers of users. While I'm unfamiliar with the results of research at Google, both analytics of production services and follow-up user labs showed very little traction for using sort to reorganize sets of information among non-technical users. It's just not how regular people think about manipulating information - in the real world, sorting a set of any interesting size is impractical if not painful. You can literally ask a loaded question - "is there any way you could sort those to make XYZ easier?" and folks will avoid that in favor of other method.
  - jcampbell1 15y ago
    That is surprising, as I have data points that show people prefer clicking "least difficult", or "most popular" vs search or an alternative categorical method. I really think it comes down to context. You use the phrase "interesting size" and that is relevant, as I only consider sorting of stuff that is generated by a human, not humankind. I fully accept the interface should be different for human data versus humankind data. I think google products often assume every list is infinitely long, and it can lead to poor interface choices.
    - tomkarlo 15y ago
      By "interesting size" I mean "large enough that it's no longer convenient to page through it." Generally, for less than that, sorting's not necessary because you can just scan through the list visually, and for longer than that, the sort generally becomes useless anyway. It didn't seem to matter if the list was 100 long or 100,0000 long. We saw less than 10% of users ever employing the sort controls; that's not zero, but it's low enough that you can't depend on them to cover use cases. The problem with your examples are that you're not really showing "sorts" from a user standpoint. What a user is really doing is effectively filtering for the "show me the N least difficult", not "sort by difficulty, ascending." Also, sorting on a relatively scaled value make more sense, but a lot of the time the values in a column don't have that kind of relationship. What's the "least zip code" good for?

jcampbell1 15y ago

I am quite sure you have fallen into the Google group think of no sorting + no folders. Every time someone at google has the balls to challenge that dogma, like replacing "add label" with "move to" in Gmail, correct usage soars. The search & labels only fallacy has led to some terrible interfaces, such as the Google Docs home page.

tomkarlo 15y ago
I'm quite sure you're wrong on that, since I know exactly how we reached that conclusion despite originally thinking otherwise. I worked on the issue at another major net company where we were dealing with a _lot_ of lists being viewed by very large numbers of users. While I'm unfamiliar with the results of research at Google, both analytics of production services and follow-up user labs showed very little traction for using sort to reorganize sets of information among non-technical users. It's just not how regular people think about manipulating information - in the real world, sorting a set of any interesting size is impractical if not painful. You can literally ask a loaded question - "is there any way you could sort those to make XYZ easier?" and folks will avoid that in favor of other method.
- jcampbell1 15y ago
  That is surprising, as I have data points that show people prefer clicking "least difficult", or "most popular" vs search or an alternative categorical method. I really think it comes down to context. You use the phrase "interesting size" and that is relevant, as I only consider sorting of stuff that is generated by a human, not humankind. I fully accept the interface should be different for human data versus humankind data. I think google products often assume every list is infinitely long, and it can lead to poor interface choices.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    By "interesting size" I mean "large enough that it's no longer convenient to page through it." Generally, for less than that, sorting's not necessary because you can just scan through the list visually, and for longer than that, the sort generally becomes useless anyway. It didn't seem to matter if the list was 100 long or 100,0000 long. We saw less than 10% of users ever employing the sort controls; that's not zero, but it's low enough that you can't depend on them to cover use cases. The problem with your examples are that you're not really showing "sorts" from a user standpoint. What a user is really doing is effectively filtering for the "show me the N least difficult", not "sort by difficulty, ascending." Also, sorting on a relatively scaled value make more sense, but a lot of the time the values in a column don't have that kind of relationship. What's the "least zip code" good for?