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CenterForOpenScience / osf-style

Stylesheet and guidelines for OSF
https://centerforopenscience.github.io/osf-style/
Apache License 2.0
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Dropdown organization #23

Closed csoderberg closed 9 years ago

csoderberg commented 9 years ago

Right now it says, "Alphabetically organize your dropdowns"

While this may often be fine, depending on what the drop down is for a non-alphabetic order may make more logical sense, or may be necessary to makes sure users scan through certain response options before getting to others.

caneruguz commented 9 years ago

While that's true, I don't know if it's so prevalent that it needs to be in the guide? Maybe we can add a sentence or too about it? Any suggestions on what it should say? @csoderberg

csoderberg commented 9 years ago

I actually think the alphabetization would tend to be the less prevalent case. In terms of where I know we use drop downs now, most of them make have an intuitive order to them other than alphabetization (e.g. contributor permissions, components, notification configuration settings, wiki edit versions).

So, perhaps something like:

When using drop downs, think carefully about the ordering of the options. Is the a hierarchical, or temporal order to the options that could be used to order them? Are they're certain options that users should see before others, assuming they are scanning down the list [this is actually just good practice whether they are using drop downs, check boxes, or radical buttons]? If none of these apply, then the drop down options should be in alphabetical order.

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 12:57 PM, Caner Uguz notifications@github.com wrote:

While that's true, I don't know if it's so prevalent that it needs to be in the guide? Maybe we can add a sentence or too about it? Any suggestions on what it should say? @csoderberg https://github.com/csoderberg

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/caneruguz/osf-style/issues/23#issuecomment-112136645.

Courtney Soderberg, Ph.D Statistical and Methodological Consultant Center for Open Science

caneruguz commented 9 years ago

I like that text, I'll add to the appropriate section.

csoderberg commented 9 years ago

So I just realized that this comment is per tenant for both selects and drop-downs I think (still not quite sure about which of the things I listed above on the OSF would be considered selects vs. drop downs)

csoderberg commented 9 years ago

Basically, the main point of my comment is that, when giving people options in any form (checkboxes, radical buttons, drop downs, selects) we should think about the order carefully, and alphabetical should be the option when there isn't another than makes sense.