For your designers, at least, you see this a lot in Adobe CS products. Come to think of it, you also see it in Excel -- enable Autofilters, and select only some of the values in the drop down.
Those are examples of mixed values, not tree hierarchies, of course. Hope that helps, Amy Jones -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Meredith Noble Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 9:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Trees & Mixed Value Selections Unfortunately our testing was incomplete -- we were only able to test 5 people, so clearly not a great sample, but the pattern was still clear (utter cluelessness with respect to the mixed value). It's hard to know what to call the participants, but they keep track of all of the service contracts / devices within their company. All were middle-aged. I'd be really curious to repeat on people in their teens / 20s. I still fear that rates of understanding would be dismal, but who knows. I think the results are complicated by the fact that we were testing a paper prototype. Testing a tree picker on a paper prototype is NOT something I would recommend (!). I am having trouble deciding what issues arose because they didn't experience the true dynamics of the tree, vs. what issues are genuine. I have UX designers in my own office telling me that they've never seen a mixed value in their entire lives! This blows my mind. The trouble is, I can't think of any immediate examples of panels with them on OS X or Windows. Anyone?? To answer your question, 3500 = number of leaf nodes Those can be arranged in an extremely simple hierarchy, or something much more complex. The arrangement options are pretty limitless (sadly) so I'm pretty much looking at a file system paradigm. Unfortunately there is no additional sense of categorization that can be layered on to limit numbers -- would have done that a long time ago if I could have :) Thanks for the suggestion of the legend, the italicization and the accordion view. All are worth a ponder. I am trying hard to focus on the 90% case, while still letting things work for the remain 10%. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=45857 ________________________________________________________________ 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 ________________________________________________________________ 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
