Brief usability quiz – please come up with your answers quickly, without thinking about it too hard, and without referring to any favourite apps which have this feature.
If you have tabular sortable data, and each column has a title and then two little sort arrows like this:
|
1) If I said “point to the ‘ascending sort’ arrow”, is that the left hand one or the right hand one? Remember, don’t think about it, just answer.
2) If you click the upward-pointing arrow, the one on the left, do you expect A or B?
A |
B |
||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
3) Look back at the lists A and B. Which one is in ascending order – A or B?
Feel free to then go away and find out what your favourite apps do and whether it matches, but please don’t add that information to the comments for a day or two, to avoid biasing other people.
1) The left arrow.
2) B
3) A
1) Left
2) A
3) A
1) Left
2) A
3) A
I’m the fifth dentist who recommends sugared gum. These are my honest gut reaction answers.
1) Right
2) B
3) A
Further, for some reason I “feel” the arrows should be in reverse order, too. Weird.
Left, A, A
1) what’s an ascending sort?
2) B
3) what’s an ascending sort?
IMO you have the arrows reversed. The down arrow should be first, indicating normal alphabetical sort.
Left, A, A.
And IMHO that’s a horrible UI.
1) Left
2) A
3) A
The pictures make it unclear whether you’re referring to alphabetical ascension or physical ascension. I probably wouldn’t even know what those buttons were for until i clicked on them/got a tooltip. Which makes them about as effective (for me, not necessarily for most) as having a single button that just reverses sort order. That said: Left A A.
Left, A, A, and I know apps don’t agree with me (but no idea which ones)
0) I’d just click on the column I want to sort, and click again if I wanted the opposite ordering. The arrows are meerly distractions, and from previous experience I have little faith that they’ll indicate what I’m expecting.
1) Right
2) B
3) A
I don’t know that I recall ever seeing an app with two widgets for this, and I’m not sure why it would be wanted. Usually there’s one (per column), and if the list is already sorted by that column the arrow flips vertically and the sort order reverses, and this has always seemed like a sensible UI to me.
Of course, many (perhaps most) end users are just plain not aware that clicking the arrow at the top of a column header like that will sort by that column, or even that there is a way to have such lists automatically sorted. But I don’t know what to do about that, other than educating individual users one at a time, or cluttering the UI with a much more obtrusive “Sort” button, which seems like a terrible waste of precious screen real estate given the frustratingly small sizes of most consumer monitors.
1 – The one that remains when the list is sorted in ascendent order. I don’t give it a name, actually… I just know it has two opposite sort states and expect them to cycle (along with unsorted) when I click the arrow thing
2 – I expect to get either the opposite sorting or unsorted.
3 – I expect to get either the opposite sorting or unsorted.
Left, A, A
This has always been something that’s confused me. I’m hoping you’re hiding away a solution :)
1. Right
2. B
3. A
1. Left
2. A
3. A
1. Right
2. B
3. A
Left, B, A.
1. Right
2. B
3. A
I “feel” the arrows should be in reverse order as well. I guess that’s just because it seems the left one should be the one sorts in alphabetical order.
Left
A
A
—
But i’ve noticed that most apps have the opposite concept of the arrows than what i have…
I usually think of it as a triangle
With an upward pointing triangle – the width of the shape is largest at the base/bottom…
Thus the list should be sorted with the smallest items on top
But none the less- the UI is seldom very intuitive – i’m sure it really varies from person to person, what notion the have with the current UI
Left
A
A
but in real life I use the same algorithm as Justin ;-)
Right (If ascending is A->Z)
A
A (If ascending is A->Z)
1) No idea without thinking what “ascending” means.
2) B
3) A
At first though (before reading the comments):
1) Left.
2) B
3) B
After reading the comments, what I’ve to say is (well… we have two says, so we can start biasing people… oh… errr expressing opinions):
I’d fully agreed with Smedberg.
I’ve written an answer based on the meaning of the shapes: an up arrow reminds me something going up physically, i.e: it would go alphabetically from bottom to top.
A down arrow would represent normal alphabetical-ascending-physically-descending order :P.
For short:
the arrow would indicate the physical order that the lexical order should follows.
Down arrow: lexical order goes from top to bottom.
Up arrow: lexical order goes from bottom to top.
Is this a question usability post or are you trying to tell some document writer is wrong? I.e., have you found some bad documentation about XUL ordering :P?
I believe you want to know if most people thinks the same way as I or sskroeder.
But so, it’s a very complex thing to make this fairly simple case study
Got it:
1) triangles ▲ and arrows ↑ are different. sskroeder though of the shape itself, making his conclusions based on the width on each point. He wouldn’t think the same way with an arrow itself.
For me it’s very hard to think of a upward triangle meaning something that grows from top to bottom. But I’ve a very technical thinking.
I could change my perception if we had some other thing that differenced the triangle from an arrow itself (as the coloring of a upward triangle going top-bottom from light blue to dark blue or from blue to red, or the triangle having some texture representing building, sand….).
2) Your quiz doesn’t mimic the exact behaviour of the XUL widgets.
3) The worse: “ascending order” was not very clear. You don’t have how to know if each one of these answers come from a misunderstooding from what you wanted to say with “ascending order” or the actual perception from each one (if an upward triangle should mean that the physical ordering should follows lexical ordering or the opposite).
:P
PS: What I wanted to say hear could be more clear with some pictures. I have a bad English too, by the way.
I don’t care. In a real situation I click until I get what I want. This is what I have to do for most tree headings (eg. lists of email messages in Thunderbird, list of prefs in about:config), and I don’t treat web ones any different. The reason for the extra UI is lost on me.
Left
A
A
I completely agree with Justin Dolske. Especially on web sites you never know what (or if at all) the designer thought. Plus, clicking the column title is a much larger target. On the other hand, oftentimes exactly this is not possible as the title is not active.
But for the record: Left, A, A
Thinking about it, it probably doesn’t matter whether the left triangle is pointing upward or downward – the mere fact that it comes first (in our l-to-r world) seems to indicate that it causes ordering a-z, and not z-a …
Is the icon an arrow or a triangle? To me, an “upward pointing” triangle is an iconic representation of the sorted data i.e. small at the top and big at the bottom.
An true arrow icon is more ambiguous — does it point in the direction of the sort order (down for small-to-large) or does it point up for an “ascending” sort? The root of the confusion is really the terms “ascending” and “descending”, as an “ascending” sort increases in value as you go down the page.
As Brandon alludes to, there is an ambiguity between ascending in terms of increasing values (as you go through the list in the usual physical order, i.e. down) and ascending in terms of physical position (as you go through the list in the usual order of value, i.e. increasing). Unfortunately these two interpretations lead to opposite conclusions. And a further complication is that for numerical data the concept of increasing values is more intuitive than it is for string data, and this may affect whether or not it “wins” over the physical position interpretation.
It might at a stretch be possible to resolve this by having buttons with labels that suggest only an ordering of data values, without conveying any ideas of physical vertical position. “+” and “-” may be a possibility. I guess that for string data you might have “A-Z” and “Z-A”. In any event, whichever ordering is more the expected norm ought to be first after the title (i.e. left), as Stefan says.
And even so, the approach of click once for sort by increasing values, click again for decreasing, as Jonadab mentions, may be best.
1) Left
2) A
3) A
1. Left
2. A
3. A
1) Left
2) A initial reaction, but realistically I would just click and then click again until the order was what I wanted – another words, I can see it both ways (and have). :)
3) A
To expand on question 1 – I would never ask the question that way – “ascending sort” is unnecessarily confusing. Unless that was your point. :D
To expand on question 2 – I would prefer a single arrow that changed based on what the current sort mechanism is. Then I don’t really care which way it is pointing, I just click on it if I want it the opposite way. This is (IMVHO) more usable.
Edit: just noticed Justin and others espoused the same philosophy on ignoring which way the arrow is pointing. :)
Sorry for the late comment.
1. Left
2. B
3. A
Very interesting. For me, an ‘upward’-pointing means in ‘downward’ order.
But if I thought about it very hard, I’d say:
1. Left
2. A
3. A