adamsj

They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it. --Gracie Allen

Anyway, I do agree that separating the ++ label and the -- button here would be useful. I think a few   characters would do the trick.

I would call the current Perl Monks voter interface a modified butterfly. A butterfly ballot occurs when a button or recording mechanism or punch hole is placed in between two labels. Only one of the two adjacent label is the applicable one, however.

Some users, including me, may only see the ++ label and button immediately to the right of it. We are exactly like the Palm Beach voter-victim who said that he saw the label "Democratic" and a punch-hole to the right of the label. He further knew that under Florida law the second punch-hole on a ballot must go to the largest out-of-power party (which in Florida was the Democrats.) So he punched the hole to the right of the word "Democratic," but surprise! The user was supposed to read the other labels first. Bad design.

The point is, the user looked at the interface in a different way than the designer intended. Good interface design is as unambiguous as possible. It permits even a user who only looks at part of the interface to make a wise choice.

Suggestion: Drink more coffee ;)

But don't you think that good interface design is important?

If a feature of this site embodies bad design, then whether the feature actually gets fixed may matter less than discussing whether the feature embodies bad design and why.

I would argue that an interface which takes a few seconds to figure out but that could be fixed to be unambiguous (e.g., listing the options one label per row in a non-butterfly fashion) is a bad interface design. That is a worthwhile observation.

Sierrathedog04's Rule: On an HTML form, list the choices one label per row, or else space out the labels so that no radio button is ever equidistant between two labels. Since browsers ignore more than one consecutive space, one can space out labels by adding <pre>          </pre> to the start of the second label. The browser does not parse anything between the pre tags, so it preserves the extra whitespace.

i would have done it differently myself...

Form elements are stripped from nodes so to see a minor modification that removes localized confusion go to my home node (for the next few days).

I put each label adjacent to its own button and the neighbor's label so that no label is adjacent to its neighbor's button.

Note that I changed the lable on the "null vote" option from "+=0" to "no vote" since one day I'd like to see an "abstain" option that acts like a vote in that it uses up one of your votes, lets you see the rep of the node, and prevents you from voting on that node in the future, but that is different in that it doesn't change the node's rep, and has no chance of giving you (or the node's author) XP.

   -- ( )  (*)  ( ) ++
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I think the purpose of a null vote is to allow a user to see what a post's reputation is. One can only see that information if one has already voted concerning the post.

Otherwise seeing a post's reputation might affect the vote for or against that post.That would be sort of a late-polls-closing-in-Northern-Florida problem, but one that is effectively addressed here at perlmonks.org by preserving the null vote option.

The null vote does not actually cast a vote, so it doesn't let you see a comment's reputation. Its presence is just so that if you click on ++ or -- and later change your mind, you can "null" the vote out and submit the form (with the rest of your votes) without having to refresh the page to clear your click.

A null vote does not show you the node's reputation. The existence of the null vote, to the best of my knowledge, has more to do with the browser choice of some perlmonks than to do with anything else. It also has that handy feature also mentioned - changing your mind before you hit the 'submit' button.