Sources
Yesterday I came up with an idea for encouraging people to enter sources:
Namely, grey out information that doesn’t yet have a source. For me personally, something like this would certainly make me want to bring all my information to “full strength,” so to speak, and it would remind me at a glance what pieces of evidence are still unsourced. Thoughts?
Incidentally, seeing it laid out this way has made me wonder if Backpackesque pages would be a good way to manage the individual detail pages. There’d still be a pedigree, of course, but each person would have their own page, and users would be able to edit them the same way you edit a Backpack page, ordering things however they want. Advantages: closer integration with the research pages, and you could put anything on the page however you want (flexibility), and it’s more in line with the nature of the web. And you could easily publish a user page (make it public), or send the link to someone else. Disadvantages: it seems like things could get rather cluttered. And I’m not sure if it would actually work. (The thing that I’m not sure about is the connection between the individual pages and the pedigree. I suppose there could be certain database fields that show up in the pedigree, or perhaps make it flexible and let the user choose which fields they want to appear there.) Hmm… This is mostly in my head still, so bear with me if it doesn’t quite make sense yet. :)
If you haven’t already tried Backpack, go register (for free) and play around with it a bit. What I like about it is that users are free to organize their stuff however they want. That’s important. People are different, and I want Beyond to allow people to work the way they want to work. That doesn’t mean shrugging off all design decisions onto the user, of course, but it does mean that the system should be flexible enough to provide for individuality in research method.
This’ll require some thought… (And a clearer explanation so you can see what I’m envisioning.)
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Another thought is to use the red squiggly lines like you have when a word is misspelled (though probably a bit more subdued in color and brightness). I like having that notion that something is “wrong” when there aren’t sources, and that will lead people to fix it. Another might be to badge it with a warning yellow triangle, or things like that.
I think red squiggly lines might make the user think the data was misspelled, because it’s used almost exclusively in the word processor/spellchecker domain. As for the yellow warning triangle, I’d hesitate to make the “wrongness” of not having a source so strongly marked. (That level probably ought to be reserved for real errors — conflicts, impossibilities, etc.) The more subtle psychological almost-but-not-quite-there feel to the greyed-out text seems to be not quite so grating. But that’s just me. :) Anyway, I’ll try to get some prototypes up soon so we can see if this grey-out idea actually works.