I'm also very interested in opinions/discussion regarding Squishdot's usability so I think its okay to post this at Squishdot's mailing list or even post this as an article at the website itself. ross boylan <rossboylan@stanfordalumni.org> wrote:

I posted this at a site I'm working on which uses ZDiscussions. I thought it might be of some interest for the Zope-dev list too. I know that a number of these ideas are in a squishdot direction, so I've added a few thoughts on that at the bottom.

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------------------------ sqishdot postscript In the above, all the following are squishy: * flat hierarchy * expand out the postings under the heading * reverse chrono sort

But I think squishdot has some major usability issues itself: * The screen is way too busy, and having multiple things going on in different subareas of the screen is going to lose people. I say this based partly on general principles, and partly based on having watched a couple of people navigating around some sites.

Well, its because I was literally copying Slashdot's design -- its not inherent in squishdot itself -- you could design a set of simpler screens or use the plain vanilla mode... Given the current design, could you give me more details on what and where exactly people are having problems with it?

* As far as I can tell, once stuff disappears off the bottom of squishdot, it's just gone. And there isn't room for that much. Well, the number of articles is set via an option in the options tab And its not exactly gone -- if you search for it, its still there.

The reason why things fall off the page comes from the assumption that as news gets older, it gets less important -- doesnt it? In fact, thats the reason for the previous articles box -- it should show all the article titles for the past week (any older than that would probably be not very important) and you can also control how old the articles that are listed in the previous articles box... However, if you still wanted a list of all articles, I suppose you could build a page that did that -- I just think a list of the most recent articles is the default one that most people would prefer...

* The novice view should not be the only option.

Exactly what do you mean by novice view?

Well, this seems like a natural for cross-posting to squishdot, but since that is frowned on, I won't.

I, for one, won't frown on it :). Regards, Butch ===== Butch Landingin Squishdot maintainer http://squishdot.org squishdot@yahoo.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. All in one place. Yahoo! Shopping: http://shopping.yahoo.com