(2) Poor external nav/orientation in votespace browser

[Michael Allan]

This appears to be problem #2:
http://u.zelea.com:8080/v/w/Votespace?u=Jim-GilliamCom&p=G!p!sandbox

It's too difficult to navigate outside of the votespace browser,
e.g. to position pages, and so forth.  This is what you guys are
saying, and I agree.  It's hard even to *know* what all the navigation
possibilities might be (missing information and poor visualizations).
These are the basic problems, right?

I'll do a full redesign proposal for this page.  (I think it's long
overdue.)  The top part of the page (pollserver tabs, title , pollwiki
icon-links) is roughly OK, and the internal navigation (horizontal
tree, static URLs) is excellent IMHO; but the rest needs a complete
overhaul.  A couple of things I can forsee:

 a) We'll have a user info-panel.  Clicking on a node in the tree
    (username) will fill the panel with details about that user,
    including every link that could possibly be useful.  The panel
    will be extensible, of course, so it'll be easy to add new
    info-fields.

 b) We'll be able to select a second username from anywhere in the
    tree, for purposes of doing a diff (or whatever).

 c) In-tree views and controls will be minimized.  All possible
    controls (including 2nd selection) will be outside of the tree
    (e.g. in the info-panel).

    Some of the in-tree views may be modal (one at a time).  So the
    tree could be painted/decorated according to various different
    criteria, depending on what the user needed, at a given time.
    (Examples?  Not sure yet... Thomas mentioned the boolean has/has
    not for position drafts.)

 d) We could aim for beauty, this time.  I can do proper mock-ups
    before coding anything.  (It's worth it, right?  The votespace
    browser is always going to be an important view.)

I'll start working on a more detailed proposal,
-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/