I would profit from the Intelligence Trainer much more if the filtering slider worked in another way: Currently, having been moved to the left, the stories title pane shows ALL unread feeds. Honestly, though I marked many feeds red, I don’t dare to delete them unchecked ("maybe “there’s a jewel in the dustbin”…)
So I’d prefer if the slider’s on the left showed ONLY the stories I don’t like. In that case I would be able to look through them only by having a brief glance at the stories title pane, likely to delete them en bloc. Nice idea, or considered a long time ago and adjuged - for what reason, I’d then like to know - bad? tnx.
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Instead of a slider, you want a seven-state (2^3 = 8 - 1, since we don’t want the case where everything is off), three-button action bar.
X=off, O=on. [red, yellow, green]
Here is the slider today:
XXO = green only
XOO = green + yellow
OOO = green + yellow + red
What you want is to allow these additional combinations:
XOX = yellow only
OXX = red only
OOX = yellow + red
OXO = green + red
You can see why I didn’t implement this sort of multi-state interaction, since it’s a lot of work to switch the states to what you really want. The way I have it, you can only drag a simple slider that is “inclusive”, in that it includes everything above the state you have set.
The idea is that red stories are stories you don’t want to see, while green stories are those you do want to see if you don’t have time to read the yellow stories. I think the current slider works with that scenario quite well. It’s just so much simpler than allowing all 7 states.
Thank u very much for boiling down the problem to its mathematical core (-;
Your answer confirmed my suspicion (cost-value ratio > 1). But I’m glad I asked my question, because your remark (“The idea is…”) gave reason to try out something which formerly didn’t come to my mind: I was always clicking on “Everything” to fetch all the feeds by having placed the slider to the left. Why? Well, I thought “everything” means “everything”, doesn’t it? (…), so (unconsciously) I never considered placing the slider to the right at first, then fetching all the green feeds (by clicking “everything” - u must concede this is not “right” (-; ), then placing it in center, fetching the yellow ones, and voilà: Slider to the left, fetching a third time, and all there is are my beloved red feeds on their own.
Why I didn’t consider this before? “Business before pleasure” has taken my mind: “No, u are not allowed to read the good stories before u haven’t had a look at the bad ones”…
Happy holidays!
I see your point. You see the scores more of tags. Red stories, yellow stories, green stories. If NewsBlur was a more advanced product, I could see a dialog that allows you to auto-tag stories based on criteria, and then do what you like with those tags (colors, filterings, even groups/separate feeds, etc). But certainly not today, and I can only see how a complicated/advanced interface would hurt adoption with only a nominal boost in engagement.
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Interesting how u brought it again to the point: Yes, I saw it more of tags. Now I understand it better, and my aforementioned workaround satisfies my needs. I always remember what the italians say, too: Il meglio è l’inimico del bene (Better is the enemy of good).
We have a similar saying: better is the enemy of done, although I think the ending with ‘good’ is more popular. My preferred way of putting it: real artists ship.
So now, having changed the look of the former slider, you indeed shipped (-;
It also looks better.
It’s just form. The function is identical, if not a little more intuitive.