[Sigia-l] Arrows and Sort Order

[Todd R.Warfel]

Hmm. And I thought that was going to scroll the list, as it's a 
standard convention to scroll things up and down. Perhaps if they 
separated the up and down arrows it could improve the model.

We tested this quite a bit with nearly a dozen Web-based applications 
for data exploration and visualization at Cornell last year. What we 
found was pretty much what's already been said - there's no defacto 
standard and most people are only 50-60 percent sure which way it will 
sort prior to hitting the button. We tested around 10 participants for 
each of the dozen applications and when asked what their confidence was 
before and after the action, they were about 50-60% correct.

Here's a quick list of some examples:

Apple, Microsoft, and Extensis use /\ to represent descending:
• Apple uses /\ to represent A-Z (descending in iTunes), or oldest date 
to newest date from top to bottom of the list in Mail (descending?).
• MS uses /\ to represent descending in Entourage - oldest date at the 
top, most recent at the bottom.
• Extensis uses /\ to represent descending - A at the top and Z at the 
bottom.

But did any of us remember that? Probably very few. What we found was 
that even though users weren't really sure whether it was ascending or 
descending, the fact that the indicator changed was a good enough clue 
to help them determine that the sort order had changed. From there, 
they were able to learn what the indicator represented after several 
uses.

Hope that helps.

On Oct 9, 2003, at 4:50 AM, Salvador Pardo wrote:

> Users may list the results of a diamond search contextulized, in an 
> easy way
> for learning how to order the list of results. So the application 
> offers
> them both arrows (Ascendent order and descendent order) close together 
> for
> them to try to order the results as they want.

Cheers!

Todd R. Warfel
User Experience Architect
MessageFirst | making products easier to use
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