Loomio

Long polling answers look bit silly

Leo Sammallahti PublicSeen by 57

Here's an image. You can see that the poll answers below don't cross the redline, but the answer options above do. Don't know how to explain it better :D, hope you understand what I mean.

I'm sure there's more urgent things to do, but if fixing this is not a big deal, it might make Loomio look bit better :).

Robert Guthrie

I'll give my understanding of the situation.

In the original plan for polls, it was not expected that options would be long. They were intended to be names, not descriptions.

And for the record, I still think we should force users to keep options short and they should explain the details of the options within the poll description field, where they can use formatting and whatever.

But at some point we decided to let users have very long options and that is basically incompatible with the bargraph design for the results. Because there isn't a good way to make the title fit in the space of the bar.

So what do we do? There is a need on a bar graph, to have titles that fit within the graph, so I'm leaning towards forcing option titles to be short.. there isn't another way to have a bar graph that makes sense.

There was a period of time where we tried lots of CSS tricks to make them look better, but I think my point above is the relevant one.

Looking at your example, I can see a lot of text that is unnecessary for the option name.

mike_hales

Yes, push the wordiness backwards, into the poll description and discussion thread

Julien Carnot

If the label has to be option A or option 2 and the user has to go back and forth between the context and the poll to know what to vote for, I don't see this as a great experience...

Limiting length can lead to dumbed down / less nuanced decisions. In my groups, I've used a hundred characters option labels and would not have wanted to make them shorter, because otherwise I'd have had to duplicate some parts of them and write a longer context.

Looking at my capture on GitHub, I don' t see why a bar chart with bars having different heights (but still a representative length) would be a problem. So in my view, setting a 255 characters limit and removing the non-breakable spaces that are added in the output would be a more flexible solution, even though I agree most polls options should be short and straightforward...

Robert Guthrie

I don't understand why you can't give an option a short name - especially if the concept is big. I think it's necessary to conduct a poll.

I'm saying that I can't make an UI that supports long sentences in a bar graph, and because I've not held a strong line on that we've got a broken looking app.

Making the bars higher (ie: multiple line names) is a bad idea, because bars are supposed to visually represent how options compare, if they have different heights they have larger area, and that concept is then broken. I want a higher standard than that.

People may have to try harder when making polls and I think it will be a better voting experience because of it.

Robert Guthrie

Would someone mind exploring what the right max length for a poll option is?