Apr
05
posted at: 7:39 AM
My coworker and I today, who coincidentally also did a serious revamp of his site yesterday, had a brief conversation today about whether or not blog comments should be sorted in ascending or descending order. While the intial agreement was that the standard convention was to sort in ascending order, that is, the most recent posting could be viewed at the bottom of the list. I got to thinking about this as I was fixing some bugs on my comment form, and I started to realize that while perhaps the mainstream accepts an ascending order as a standard convention, providing good usability should really be within the context of your blog or application.
If you keep a tech blog with topics typically regarding emerging technologies, or troubleshooting potential fixes for technical problems, you may rethink that convention. Think about it. You go to a tech blog you found on Google in hopes of solving a software problem. Where do you start? You would start with the most recent comments and work your way backwards.
What I've typically found in searching for answers this way, is that for a particular topic, once a silver-bullet solution is reached, that is, a generally accepted solution is found, people will stop posting comments on the topic. It's in this particular instance you would want to have your comments sorted by date descending, so that your users can find what they are looking for faster and easier.
The surprising thing about this topic, is that I couldn't find any globally accepted standard or best practice on the topic. What few blogs there are out there tackling the topic simply seek the opinion of their user's, which, at a micro-level is what we should be doing to analyze usability anyway.
For Ascending:
http://timlambert.org/2005/11/up-or-down/
Against It:
http://communityserver.org/forums/p/469563/514085.aspx
This all bubbles back up to a larger thought of how developers should be attacking the topic of usability, particularly without access to usability experts. Communicating with and understanding your stakeholder is the first and foremost priority to help you gauge when to break the rules with standards and best practices. There are certainly times it is appropriate, but you should engage the discussion with your customer to make sure it makes the most sense for their business need. After that, it all comes down to how you apply it when you write your code, which is really the most fun part anyway.