Useful Categories of Worlds

I started this week by finishing up the badge icons. They are (for the most part) done in pure CSS. This is exciting because it means less images to upload (and make) and less code to maintain when we (inevitably) tweak the design.

I then turned back to the badges info page. Here are a couple of things I have been thinking about and (attempting to ) implement.

The “recommended” label. A couple of blog posts ago, I talked about how Jordana and I wanted to avoid from telling a user that a certain badge was  “not-recommended.” Instead, we decided to promote the badges at the user’s level (e.g. they have completed the prerequisite badge(s)) by adding a “recommended” label. The other pages would not have any labels and be gray. However, there may actually be a third category. What happens if the user skips ahead and earns a badge that she hasn’t fulfilled the prerequisites for? Under the current system, the page would continue to be in gray even though she has fulfilled the skills. Perhaps in this circumstance, if the user earns a level, the page can become color, but it just won’t have a recommended label.

I’m not sure though. Once again, this feels like something that we can discuss amongst ourselves until the cows come home, but won’t actually know what is up until user start playing with badges.

Another thing I having been playing with is what categories of worlds do we want to display for the users to remix. Here are a couple I have been thinking about:

• Badge-Earning: These are worlds that have earned this badge at that particular level.

• Recommended Remixes: Badge-earning worlds that haven’t earned any other badge. The reasoning behind this category is that these worlds will be easier to remix since they won’t have a lot of other extraneous things getting in the way. However, in actual implementation, it may be more telling to sort this worlds by number of skill instead since badges are only awarded once per user. (e.g.  Even if the world was super complicated, if the user had already earned the six other badges, the world would only earn one badge).

• Top-Remixed: Worlds that were remixed by badge-earning worlds.  I (think) I can pull out the remixers for badge-earning worlds and then sort them by number of remixes.

• Followees’ Worlds: Badge-Earning worlds authored by the people the user is following. (Side note - is “followees” the correct terminology?)

Any other suggestions for categories of worlds the user may want or find useful?

Wish me luck with the continued forays into the tangled web of Active Record queries!