Customizing the order in which icons appear on the userpics page

[ceesoo]

Title:
Customizing the order in which icons appear on the userpics page

Area:
icon management

Summary:
For users who have a lot of icons, or accumulate a lot of icons over time, it would be nice to be able to move our icons up or down the list freely, so that we don't have to worry about what order to upload icons in if we want certain icons next to each other.

Description:
====SUGGESTION====
A way for us to be able to change the order our icons are displayed in after we've already uploaded them.

What I'm envisioning is having two arrows (up and down) next to the icons on the Manage Icons page (to the right of each icon?). When you click the arrows, the icon (and keywords and etc) will move up or down the list, switching places with the icon before or after it. This will help people using 100 and 250 icons to organize their userpics page to their liking without the hassle of deleting icons and reuploading them in the desired order if they have icons they're uploading later that they wish were showing at the top, or after this specific icon, etc...

Currently there's a "Upload Order" display and "Keyword Order" display on the userpics page. It seems like there could be room for a "Custom Order" link? Ideally the custom order would be the default, so if a user decides to use a custom order it would be what shows up to other users when they click the userpics page (in which case you probably don't need "upload order"...).

====WHY IT'S THE BEST SOLUTION?====
Well, mostly it's just that there's no way to do this but the hard way, currently. The description above is just what I imagine would be easiest to deal with from the user end, but honestly I (and I know some other RPers) would probably be pleased with having ANY way to be able to customize icon order right now that doesn't involve deleting/reuploading.

====PROBLEMS/DRAWBACKS====
I'm not sure how easy it'd be to implement a change in UI like that? Especially if we want things moving around when a button is clicked. Would icons have to be renamed where they're stored to change their place on the list? Would it be more strain on the servers to have this as an option? Possibly the arrow method would take too many clicks to move a new icon to the top of the list?

====OTHER WAYS TO IMPLEMENT SUGGESTION====
A) Have a separate Manage Icons page dedicated specifically to changing the order of your icons. So you leave uploading new icons the way it is, and add a new page for moving them around.

OR

B) On the current Manage Icons page, a new text box could be added next to the icons, where you enter in the number for the order you want it to show up, the same way the order of sidebar modules is handled on some of the journal styles. You could change the numbers around to your liking and then when you hit "save" the icons are moved to their new positions.

====LAST WORDS====
So those are the three ideas I've got and I'm sure there are other ways or a combination of the above ways to accomplish the task, but the most important thing to me is having the option to customize what order my icons show up in. Thanks for considering!

Poll #8858 Customizing the order in which icons appear on the userpics page

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 98

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
42 (42.9%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
27 (27.6%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
5 (5.1%)

(I have no opinion)
24 (24.5%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[zellieh]

It's not so much the visual problems, it's the physical problems. I have a number of people on my flist with various physical disabilities, like arthritis or Ehlers-Danlos, and you need to minimise mouse movements and keyboard clicks as much as possible, and also cut down on scrolling.

So, drag and drop would be relatively easy for some people I know, because it's a fairly quick movement, but typing in just 2 or 3 numbers would be best for others, in terms of cutting down on hand and finger movements. Arrow clicks would be one of the worse options.

I don't have a screen reader either, but screen readers work in such a different way than mouse and keyboard that that's more of a coding problem, making the page layout logical, so that the screen reader reads out the most important, most frequently used options first.

IIRC, some bad LJ layouts forced people using screen readers to read through a users entire tag list, for example, before they get to read the entry. Imagine going through that every time you wanted to read something!

Changing your browsers' View - Page Style option to 'No Style' shows you the raw page, which is what screen readers read. I was told in a web design course that screen readers start at the top of the page and work their way down, so the longer it takes you to get to useful interesting stuff, that's how long it'll take someone using a screen reader. (Of course, modern screen readers may have improved significantly since then. One can only hope!)