Drop-down List of Areas in Suggestion Box

[ivorygates]

Title:
Drop-down List of Areas in Suggestion Box

Area:
Unknown

Summary:
Providing a drop-down list of areas for the "Area" box of the Suggestion Box rather than making everyone guess would minimize labeling confusion.

Description:
The Suggestions Form asks people making suggestions what area of the site their suggestion is about. But a lot of people don't know what the possibilities are. And even if they do, they might all choose to phrase their citation in a number of different ways, for example: suggestions giving the "Area" as Navigation Pages, Menu Pages, and Site Pages might all be about the same place.

If "Area" is coded instead with a drop-down list from which the user can choose one of the available tags as the subject area of their suggestion, it would standardize labeling, permitting suggestions to be searched more easily -- especially if the entry is also tagged with the "Area" label. It would make suggestion labeling easier, since a drop-down would show all the potential areas in which a suggestion could be made.

For the confused and the clueless, or those whose suggestions don't fit any of the preset labels, there could be some labels like "General" or "Unknown" (or even "Help Help I'm So Confused").

Administrators and mods would have the option of changing the Area tag to a suitable/accurate one before letting the suggestion out of queue and also, if there were enough suggestions in Area X, adding a new tag to the dropdown.

Poll #1094 Drop-down List of Areas in Suggestion Box

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 38

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
19 (50.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (5.3%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
3 (7.9%)

(I have no opinion)
13 (34.2%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.6%)

Comments

[cesy]

Sounds like a good idea in principle. However, a few things:
As far as I can see, "Area" only appears as text in the entry, though it may be similar to the tags that get added later. This makes me think that it should either be removed altogether as superfluous, or replaced with a tags box that works like the edit tags page and adds actual tags to your suggestion.

Also, to allow mods to change the Area tag as it stands would require them to be able to edit the entry, which is a whole other can of worms.

[kerravonsen]

+1

[triadruid]

I also expected it to be a dropdown, and would like it better if it could somehow leverage the area: tags. Failing that, somevolunteer going in and updating a dropdown list is okay, but painful on somebody's head. :P

[zvi]

I think this may result in one of two negative outcomes.

1) People not being able to find the Area they believe is appropriate for their suggestion, deciding that apparently Dreamwidth doesn't want to improve that particular function, and not filing the suggestion.

2) People defaulting to Unknown and rendering the Area portion of the form useless. (Even if we miraculously manage to capture all possible Area subjects, that's likely to be a long list, which has usability issues. Also, multi-select dropdowns and long arrays of checkboxes both have usability issues, themselves.) In the most recent 40 entries, this is the first one with Area Unknown.

[azurelunatic]

Supposing instead of a list with hard choices, there was a cloud of some of the popular/recent/recommended choices?

[zvi]

I am still way of this solution, as it funnels people into applying labels which may or may not be appropriate. I'm also not sure tag clouds are useful for examining labels one is not already familiar with.

So, um, better, without getting us to good.

[triadruid]

These seem to be mitigatable by having the top/bottom entry be "None of the Above/Below". I'm aware that UI research frowns on miles-long dropdowns, but we're talking about a reasonably technical part of the site and there is no other good way to have both usability and flexibility, that I'm aware of. How is Area not useless now? I have to guess every time at what the 'right' answer is, as I don't even get a laundry list in this iteration.

I would definitely prefer if it translated the field into an area: XXXXXX tag, subject of course to the 'unreviewed' tag as well.

[denise]

When I was creating the suggestions workflow, I only didn't do this because I didn't want to sit and brainstorm a whole bunch of stuff. *g*

I think it might actually work best if we use the Bugzilla components, but I have to go through and poke at the components list a little and update it, I think.

[triadruid]

*grin* I figured that Area came out of a bit of crystal-balling when dw_suggestions was being dreamed up...