My suggestions: 1. Priority should be handled with a drag/drop vertical table. The gold standard on this action is netflix's queue. It works awesome. I believe Yahoo has a design pattern for this as well. You could also do a slightly different UI with draggable sorting, but not a vertical table...keep the layout as is and just reorder them inline. 2. Delete should be handled with a red circle (x). It's different than the other kids of actions and should be handled separately. Make sure to give a blockUI modal warning to make sure they want to delete. 3. Caption should be right under the picture, and use the Overlabel plugin. This way you can put the word caption on the inside of the textbox and save space. 4. Cars.com and autotrader.com. This depends on if you plan to add more choices. If it's just 2, then I suggest making them both buttons. When they are ON, they have a graphical checkbox or green circle with a check and maybe the background is "lit". If it are not on, the it would be a graphical uncheck or a green circle with no check. They should be side by side, to save space. Layout has some options. 5. Put a rectangle around each block. The user needs to see that the whole thing is draggable as a block. This also helps with showing the grouping. 6. Finally, get rid of update and reset. When the user blurs, just save via ajax. The whole web is following google's lead on this score. Everyone is going with the save as you go model. Yes, this is a fad, but it's also a recognized idiom that users are responding well to. You would need to add something like, "last Saved at 4:11pm PST". If you keep the buttons you HAVE to make them bigger. I didnt even notice them until the end.
A wise man once told me, "When deciding what to do, you have to be willing to eat your own young. Don't fall in love with your own work". These fixes (or even a subset) would make your users very comfortable with the functionality being offered. I hope this was helpful. :) Glen On 9/15/07, Rick Faircloth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Hi, Steve... > > I haven't used the plug-in yet, but I know there's one > for dragging rows in a table (I think) and re-ordering them. > Perhaps that would be of use to you. Sorry I can't think of the > name of it. Perhaps you could browse the jQuery site and pick it up. > > I just wanted to let you know there are some other jQuery solutions. > I, too, will have to use the plug-in I described for a Real Estate site > where I create an interface that users can use to re-order the display > of agents. > > Rick > > > -----Original Message----- > From: jquery-en@googlegroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Steve Finkelstein > Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2007 7:03 PM > To: jQuery (English) > Subject: [jQuery] Can anyone suggest a jQuery way of improving this UI? > Screenshot included. > > > Hi all, > > So I created a portion of a project which users are having quite a bit > of difficulty working with. If you take a look at the following screen > shot, it'll give you the general gist of the particular page: > > http://catalyst.httpd.org/tmp/photos.png > > Here, users can order their pictures by inputting a priority number in > a text input as you can see. When they're done with their > modifications, an AJAX call is made to the server to update the > database with the respective info via the 'Update Photos' button > below. > > I was curious if there is any widgets available that will allow me to > make this following page easier to use. I'm more than happy to rewrite > this entire part of the project. I'm using jQuery in probably 99% of > my project already. Maybe drag and drop would be good here, maybe > overkill? I would definitely appreciate any advice. > > Thank you kindly for any insight folks. > > - sf > > >
