Days 5 and 6 - Voting and Viewing
Earlier in my entrepreneurial life I used to work through weekends regularly and without giving it a thought. But I try not to do that anymore. So this first weekend of my Online Primary month was a mix of family and household stuff with a little bit of advancing the project.
With the home page pretty much wireframed, I moved on to the ballot page. Among the questions I wrestled with was how to present the Ranked Choice voting. Should I use a set of selection dropdowns or lists, a list of candidates with a rank-number selector next to each, or something closer to a typic
al printed ballot. I went with the latter. Another choice I debated with myself was how many levels of choice to offer: First second and third? As many choice ranks as candidates? The 1-2-3 alternative seemed just a bit too limiting, and the latter choice overwhelming. So I settled on 1 through 5. No real justification for that; it just felt like a good alternative to try. (This is an experiment, right?) In a fit of experimental zeal, I also decided to throw in an “anybody but” column, providing voters one opportunity to give thumbs-down to a candidate they really objected to.
How will those ranked choice votes and “anybody-but” votes figure into the results? Well, that remains to be seen. I’ll have more to say about that when I get to the results section, but my initial thinking is the site will offer multiple approaches for calculating a result from these additional levels of vote. I’ll supply a couple, and I’ll try to leave room for users to provide other approaches and see how they affect the results.
No work on the site Sunday night, for sure. We’ve had a regular group coming to our house for dinner and Sopranos viewing since the start of the final season. (Yeah, we TiVo it, but none of us wants to wait any longer than necessary to see what happens next.) Not a chance I’ll miss the series finale tonight.