List Sorting Assistance Tool

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Problem

It doesn't happen often... but sometimes (and I have a specific use case) I have a big list that I need to sort, not in any kind of algorithmic way (save AI), but in a way that I want to decide how to sort. To build a taxonomy, for example...

My real world scenario, today, is I have a long list of interview questions. 50+. I need to narrow it down. I also want to make sure that I have certain categories covered, and once all my questions are in categories, I can then rank them up and down and finally settle on what I want.

Sure, you can copy and paste and do that kind of stuff. But that's inefficient. I want an efficient tool. When I'm faced with this task, I often day dream of Minority Report (maybe not a perfect correlation, but I draw one) and how Tom Cruise has a big screen in front of him and he just grabs objects and shoves them around, sorting the objects. So maybe we can't yet do it in the futuristic way using hand gestures and holograms (coming) but I think we can more-or-less solve this with today's technology.

I think this could be a pretty slick tool.

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Proposal

I picture a web app, divided vertically such that the upper portion is the buckets and the lower portion is the list to be sorted.

I picture in the upper portion you can add a bunch of buckets for dropping items from the lower portion into. You can move an item from one bucket to another. You can reorder the contents of the buckets.

In the lower portion, I picture pasting a list of items (CRLF separated). For each item, an object is created so you can just grab the object and the entire contents from that record moves with it.

So it's easy to take a flat file text list of items (or say a series of rows from a spreadsheet) and cut it up into objects. And it's easy to move these individual objects into buckets. I picture being able to quickly select a group of objects from the lower portion and move them all at once. There's no point in ordering the lower portion (that's the purpose of the upper portion) and so dragging in the lower portion causes selecting all that you pass over. Then you grab the bulk and drag to the upper portion and release into a bucket. You can then reorder objects one at a time.

[s1037989]

From today's meeting:

There's more than one way to skin a cat! This issue is about solving a very specific problem, one that can absolutely be handled by other solutions, but this solution aims to focus on this very specific problem. As a result, the UI can be cleaner and easier to use.

Action Items:

• Keith will make an Excel-based prototype because it'd be easy and phone and just to have a proof of concept that the proposed output is actually worth obtaining.
• Keith will store this work in a new Github project in the KeystoneIT organization and reference it here.