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Site Tweak: Ridiculous Revision To A Silly Decision
27 March 2018
Sometimes a metaphor can confuse more than it enlightens. But the thing about metaphors is that they're very convincing. So even as it's confusing you, you think it's making an unassailable point.
That's our excuse for how we have been ordering our Carousel controls. The metaphor was a music player's controls or a DVD player or a remote control.
In every one of those cases, the first controls rewind and the last move forward.
The right metaphor for this use case is a book, not a music player.
For the Carousel controls that meant the top one rewinds the thumbnail Carousel on any headline page to the beginning, the one under it moves three thumbnails back at a time, the next one goes forward three and the last one fast forwards to the first thumbnail (which is also the oldest).
And if they were laid out horizontally, that would make sense. But they're laid out vertically.
So the top two do nothing when you arrive on the page and are only useful if you use the bottom two.
The right metaphor for this use case is a book, not a music player.
You want to page through the thumbnails, moving to the right and then back to the left. Even if you are going back in time that way.
So we reordered them today.
Click on the top one to move three thumbnails right, the next one to move to the very far right. Go back three using the third and all the way back to the default position using the fourth.
The minute we rearranged them, we felt better. As if all was right with the world. Or, at least, those few pixels.