Hi Jared, I'm in agreement about the limits of alphabetical order, and laid out that position earlier in the thread. I was mainly calling you to task for your treatment of Diana's argument.
> However, the original context of this thread was > for the organization of office supplies. Do people > need to ensure that all office supplies are treated > equally? To me the thread seemed to have wandered off-topic from a discussion of office supplies to a discussion of alphabetical order generally. Clearly the ego example doesn't apply to instances like product catalogs, or really, any instances where users have "finding" as their primary motivation. I'm thinking of film credits (where order of appearance is also sometimes used for this effect) or lists of contributors, or boards of directors. That sort of thing. > I'm betting that if you had watched as many users approach > as many different alphabetized lists as I have in > my career, you'd probably come to a different conclusion. I'm arguing that alphabetical order is preferable to random order in cases where other organizational possibilities don't exist. The only other conclusion to come to is that randomization is preferable to alphabetical order. Even if alphabetical order _appeared_ random, it would have the advantage of stability. Random pages would be different each time you visited them. // jeff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=30259 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
