sturnfie's Journal: Slashdot Firehose UI

So I have been using the new "firehose" feature here on Slashdot. I like it; it's a great way to see where the trends in news stories originate. It's a view port to the integral form of the content presented.

That said, and I know it is still a beta, the interface really needs some work. Once an article's summary is expanded, the voting options perform a neat disappearing act. A thrilling game of hide and seek begins, complicated by the presence of the voting options for the other articles in the immediate vicinity. Why would a voting option be offered where a person can vote on a story without reading the summary? I don't know. I do, however, know that I have accidentally voted up two crap articles and voted down an excellent article. I didn't do this because I love sticking it to the man, I did it because there is no obvious defined relation between the article I want to vote on and the voting options for it. Since placement proximity seems to be organizational mechanism used here, it needs a little more work, especially when the placement changes as you further review the submitted content.

Bringing me to my next question, how the hell do I reverse my voting decision? If the point of allowing users to vote on articles is meant to assist in filtering the crap out of the pool, it would be nice to allow the user to be able to fix their mistakes. I feel that the current state is equivalent to trash blowing off a garbage truck enroute to the dump. I realize that it is just one vote, but if I am going to take the time to do it in the first place, I would like to be given every opportunity to get it right.

I can live with a flaky interface, and I can live with lack of functionality, but if you combine these two deficits, it becomes worse than useless.

Hell, if I could figure out how to go about volunteering my time to work on it, I'd do it myself. I seem to have plenty of extra time. I believe Frank Gilroy has put the situation best: http://www.frankgilroy.com/2007/06/open-letter-to-ed-zander-of-motorola.html

--
lucas

reprise

[sturnfie]

I humbly comment that further testing shows that (as expected I suppose), the IE layout engine was responsible for much of the flakiness noted. The voting options still "move" with other engines (Opera, Firefox), but the magnitude is significantly less. -- lucas