Change the Status column's sorting labels

[thetanmancan]

Overview

Change the names (and function) of the sorting options in the Status column need to be "Sort A–Z" and "Sort Z–A".

Details

On the My Projects page, the Status column currently has two sorting options: Sort Drafts First and Sort Snapshots First. However, this sorting scheme leaves out statuses that end with "(deleted)", namely "Draft (deleted)" and "Snapshot (deleted)".

Resources

Current "Sort Drafts First" and "Sort Snapshots First" radio buttons in the Status filter overlay

Action Items

• Implement changes to the Dev site.
• Review with the product, design, and research teams. Update implementation if needed based on feedback.
• Add a slide to the the staging deck.
• After the slide has been approved by production, move it to the stakeholder presentation deck for the next stakeholder meeting.
• Get stakeholder sign-off on the stakeholder presentation deck.

Resources

See Name column for sort A-Z example

[thetanmancan]

Hi @entrotech. Would you mind taking a look at this and adding any necessary information and tags before moving it to "ready for prioritization" status?

[entrotech]

I think this is a really bad idea.
Most importantly, it conflates two different dimensions

• The Status dimension is draft or snapshot
• The Deleted dimension is active or deleted.

These two dimension are already somewhat conflated by trying to shoehorn the deleted/active dimension into the status column, and this suggestion make this problem even worse. This is why user testing showed that user had a lot of difficulty undeleting a project.
They first had to figure out how to even show deleted projects, which required checking the "Show Deleted" checkbox in the Status column filter pop-up. They do not have a way of seeing only deleted projects, so they can have trouble picking out the deleted projects from the grid, since they can't even sort in an order that groups the deleted projects together. The sorting option suggested in this issue doesn't allow you to group all the deleted project together - Instead, the deleted snapshots would be separated from the deleted drafts.

The second problem is that it requires some mental gymnastics for the user to figure out that Sort A-Z means that you need to look at the way the combination of status and deleted/active are represented in the cell contents as a string that is then sorted alphabetically.

If there was a separate "deleted" column (which we used to have), then the deleted/active column could be manipulated independently of the projects' status, solving all of these problems.

[thetanmancan]

Hi @entrotech. I agree that conflating the draft/snapshot dimension and active/deleted dimensions into one column causes a number of other problems. I would certainly prefer that they were in two different columns. The issue that Bonnie keeps mentioning is that by separating the two dimensions into two columns, we are adding one more set of columns, which she deems to be too many to fit on the screen.

There are certainly designs that would solve both of these problems, but I seriously doubt we could whip up new design mockups and implement them in the system within the amount of time we have left on this project.

If you want to voice your very valid concerns about the two-dimensions-in-one-column problem to Bonnie, we can bring them up at the 2025-01-15 team meeting, but I'm almost certain we'd have to propose another solution in its place that solves that along with the too-many-columns problem that also fits within the project's time constraints.