User cards, new worlds, and featured worlds (Week 8)

As per usual, this week was spent improving magic sort and changing partial displays.

In my proposal I talked about displaying the user partials like baseball cards or playing cards that have a "card flip" animation. This allows information to be displayed on both the "front" and the "back", but takes up half the screen space. The animation and color also make the display seem more kid-friendly and fun. This week I made the first version of this card-style partial. The user's name appears on both sides of the card, as well as an icon to follow or unfollow the user. On the front the user's profile picture and stats (number of followers, worlds, remixes, challenges, submissions) are displayed. I included basic badge stats on the front of the card as well, but the layout for those can be changed to fit whatever design Reilly decides is best. The back of the card currently just displays the user's description and when (s)he joined the site. 

When you mouse over the card, a shadow box appears around its edges, and when you click on the card it flips itself over. The animation is demonstrated here: http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2010/03/sponsor-wall-flip-jquery-css/demo.php . For users who don't have mouse over capabilities on their device, the front of the card has a small plus sign in the lower right hand corner (and a subtraction sign on the back) that indicates that there is more information to display. Even though a user can click on any non-linked part of the card to flip it, the plus/minus icons let a user know that (s)he can click at the very least in the lower right corner to flip the partial.

A while back, Caitlin and I discussed what to put on the back of the user-card and how to direct the attention away from users (has too much of a social networking feel) and back to activities (placing the focus on programming). We decided it would be neat if the user could customize the back of his/her card to display some action-related thing of which (s)he was proud. The options would include "best" world, most recent world, a specifically selected world of the user's choosing, "best" challenge, most recent challenge, a specifically selected challenge of the user's choosing, top badge, description, etc. I didn't think that this functionality was as important as magic sort, so the customizeable card backs are coming in the vague future.

In addition to creating the card partials (and spending lots of time "testing" them, since flipping them back and forth is rather fun...) I predictably worked on magic sorting. Jordana and Caitlin independently made the point to me that new worlds didn't really have a chance to "get good" since they never showed up at the top of the sort. My solution is to sprinkle new worlds into the beginning of the magic sort for the first [month] of their existence, after which their grace period ends and they get sorted by quality, i.e. in the normal sort.

For now a "new" world is one that was created within the last 30 days, and there are N new worlds. I take the top 5N worlds from the set of all sorted worlds and randomly insert the new worlds into that top 5N worlds, then reattach that set to the front of the whole collection of sorted worlds and remove duplicates. After this, the new worlds are all in the top 6N worlds, but only every 6th or so world is a new (and thus probably lower-quality) world, so the sort still in general puts good/interesting worlds at the top.

I used a similar technique to put featured worlds at the top, but since featured worlds clearly have some merit, they get sorted into the top N worlds, where N is the number of featured worlds. So roughly every other world is featured until all the featured worlds are up, and then normal sort resumes.

The constants for new and featured worlds are easily changed in the world model, and when I demo at lab meeting tomorrow, I'll be using smaller numbers, since we have 15 test worlds, rather than an active site's worth.