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natestedman / Observatory

A Python based dashboard for the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software. For continued development, please see http://github.com/rcos/observatory
rcos.rpi.edu
ISC License
8 stars 14 forks source link

Legend of smiley faces #59

Open daviddoria opened 13 years ago

daviddoria commented 13 years ago

Have a legend at the top of the projects page that says:

:) = committed code within the last 3 days, blogged within a week, etc :| = committed code within a week, etc :( = Hasn't committed in longer than a week

(or whatever the current rules are).

hortont424 commented 13 years ago

If it hasn't changed since I last saw it, it's not something simple like that, it's related to the ranking, which is computed using a somewhat odd formula that came partially from the old dashboard, and computes a "score" based on both ages.

It's possible that a more explicit approach might not be a bad idea.

colinsullivan commented 13 years ago

My vote would be against the legend, as I don't think it is necessary. I think it is pretty obvious why a project has a smiley face, as they are in order and 100px below the smiley face is the information you mentioned (repo updated 3 days ago, blog updated 3 days ago).

Also Tim is right, it is calculated here: https://github.com/NateStedman/Observatory/blob/master/observatory/dashboard/models/Project.py#L81-L99

zalberico commented 13 years ago

I don't think a legend is necessary, you can't get much more intuitive than actual drawings of smiley faces.

daviddoria commented 13 years ago

fossuser - who are you?

Also, of course you get a relative idea from the smiley faces (smiley is better than frowny), but you don't know what they actually mean. Since it is a discrete system (there are only 3 choices of icons) I'd like to know the thresholds at which they switch.

If not a legend, at least a link to an explanation - "What do the smiley icons indicate?"

zalberico commented 13 years ago

Hi, I'm Zachary Alberico.

My opinion is since the update information is located right there I think it's unnecessary to define the particular thresholds for the smiley faces. I think it would add clutter to the page when the point of the smileys is just to give the general feeling if something is being updated or not. I also can't really think of a situation where knowing the thresholds would be important either.

colinsullivan commented 13 years ago

I agree with Zachary. It is good UX practice to present your data to the user in an intuitive way, so they can get the most information from the least amount of presentation.

daviddoria commented 13 years ago

I'd like to re-request a link to an explanation - "What do the smiley icons indicate?"

I've had a few meeting in the past week where people have said "what do the different smileys mean?" and I didn't know what to tell them. This information should certainly be available somewhere (since its bad design to display more than the smiley on each project). We could just make everything green to make RCOS look good and say our metric for being green is "having ever though about the project". I think revealing the metric is not only useful but also in the spirit of "openness".