4 ms·
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.
by 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 agoBy "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?