Note from the Editor: Our voting buttons…
We are aware of the limited value of our current voting buttons. We intended to have readers vote for or against trends/designs, and then track the most popular and least popular. There is admittedly some ambiguity with our current implementation (e.g. are you voting for the post/author or the trend?) and some have even questioned whether a simple “thumbs up/down” is the right approach.
Suffice it to say, we are investigating alternatives and welcome suggestions.
Thanks for your interest in UI Trends!
Russ
Ron Norman
Aug 27, 2009
8:12 am
I think we need a UI trend for “thumbs up/down” buttons :)
John
Aug 27, 2009
1:30 pm
It all depends on what your going for. My initial assumption was to vote based on if i like the trend in general. However, it could be a legitimate trend without me liking it (probably the case actually). So in that case I could vote it up to agree that it IS indeed a trend. Or take the opposite approach and vote it down to say i dislike the trend.
My suggestion thus would be to break the voting into subsections. Although more complex and more confusing to your users, it will be more useful. Also we can assume some level of sophistication among users with regards to UI as this is a UI trends page in the first place :)
Trendiness – is, or is this not a emerging trend.
Likability – is this a UI feature we like.
Good-spot – poster has a good eye and found something interesting
Those would be my initial three subcategories (but clearly not a verbose list).
From the implementation side i would weight each of them so that they combined into a overall rating (seeing stars anyone?) with Trendiness being the highest weighted and likability the next.
This would provide a overall rating that can be display (and searched) for each trend.
I would also consider thinking about discussing usability. It kind of fall into the likabilty category (as i would assume people don’t like what isn’t usable) but may want to break it out into its own thing.
Just a thought. don’t shoot me.