Add highlighting of new policy additions to votes pages

[TomSteinberg]

[zarino]

@TomSteinberg – A related thought: are there any plans for notifying email subscribers about recently added vote data for the MPs they're watching?

[struan]

There's no way to really add anything other than a general 'we have new vote analysis' text in to the email templates although we could do that.

[wrightmartin]

How about the voting summary only shows new votes? The random vote summary could be replaced?

[zarino]

It struck me that, as well as recent votes, we'd also talked about highlighting "hot topics" that people search for more frequently. Both are lists of "hey, you'll be more interested in these" items.

Here are two ways of potentially showing both bits of data – one taking inspiration from status icons in Alaveteli, and the other from the topics page design:

Or, as @wrightmartin says, the ultimate low-maintenance move would be to show recently added items instead of a random selection, with exactly the same layout as right now.

[wrightmartin]

I like the second one.

The status icons are trying to communicate something that's really subjective. It might be really good for me that my MP votes rebelliously, for example.

[wrightmartin]

This relates to #479

[struan]

I prefer the first. The second looks too much like the 'From around the web' advertising things that you see now.

[zarino]

Oh, and as @wrightmartin notes, the summary of how vote strengths are calculated, that I tried to include in the first mockup, is part of #558.

[wrightmartin]

Worst ever client request: What would 2 look like without the large photos (thumbs?) and the layout of 1

[jacksonj04]

I'm with @wrightmartin in that the icons are pretty subjective. I'm alright with green/red iconography (in the sense of the person is saying "go" or "stop" to an issue), but the thumb up/down seems a bit too much like we think it's a positive or negative thing.

[wrightmartin]

hah, @jacksonj04 I just remembered I did that in the original designs... https://github.com/mysociety/theyworkforyou/issues/399#issuecomment-35079339

[zarino]

@wrightmartin – here are two versions without thumbs-up/down icons.

I'm still keen on the 2-column approach – it's more economical with space, and it implies hot topics and recent additions are equally important. I'm not sure how we'd handle the "Details" link though…

[jacksonj04]

I'm also a fan of two columns. I'm not sure if I'm for or against having an icon on the rebellion rate at all.

[wrightmartin]

Second one for me, all the way. The 2-column approach would only apply to large screens anyway, no? And, I agree with nick about the rebellion icon

[zarino]

For those following along at home, here's a mockup of two alternate ways of making the items look clickable – the idea is to avoid repeating the word "details", and to come up with something that'll work on both the narrow two-column Voting Summary and the main "Voting Record" page too.

There's not much of a standard in this area (how do you show something is clickable, without hover effects, and without underlining it all in blue?) but I think we're leaning towards the left-hand option here, with the > symbol:

Building on @wrightmartin's work in https://github.com/mysociety/theyworkforyou/issues/479#issuecomment-47629854, and recently merged pull request with external link icons, the extension of this pattern on the "Voting Details" page could look like this: