Sliders
One of last year's Innovation Lab commissions was a small R&D project
to make a visual filter for news stories. The result so far is a pair
of sliders which filter four news feeds into a single list.
The focus is on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ website's 'Where I Live' section, and the aim
is to allow users to choose a balance of News and Local Features, as
well as varying the geographical mix. The slider may have wider
applicability depending on how useful and intuitive it proves to be.
We'd like your feedback.
Two sliders are used, the first to mix two pairs of feeds into two
lists, and the second to mix the two lists together. Stories are
given a value based on their order within the feed, and as the slider
moves across, low value stories from one list drop off, to be
replaced by high value stories from the new list.
The application is in two parts:
* a Perl script which consumes RSS feeds (using XML::FeedPP) and
generates an embedded JSON array containing the stories from all four
sources and their rank.
* a Javascript function which combines and generates the list(s)
visible on the page.
Since the timescales of 'News' and 'Local Features' differ so widely
(news changing by the minute, features dating back weeks) it was not
possible to elegantly rank the lists strictly on their publication
date -- instead we chose to simply score them according to their rank
position in the original feed.
In this prototype the source feeds are hard-coded into the script,
but this could easily be changed. Unfortunately the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ does not have
a very RESTful interface to their 'Local Features' XML, and with no
consistency in the URL format there is no simple programatic way to
access all the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ regions.
The slider is very basically styled, but is it intuitive? Does the
data shift as you might expect? Are two sliders too complex? Is a
slider appropriate here, or should something else be used? Is the
sorting algorithm right? What should we do about duplicate entries?
We're interested to know what you think.
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