Monday, January 11th, 2010

Colored check marks

I’ve change the green check marks to a palette of four colors, so you can distinguish at a glance books in your library, wish list, read-but-unowned list and other collections.

The check marks pop up on recommendations and statistics pages. So far, members have been particularly happy to see them on your Series Statistics page, which lists all the series in your library, and which books in the series you have in the various collections.

As should become immediately obvious, colors can’t do justice to all the complexity of collections. Not every collection gets a color, and we aren’t mixing up paint buckets when a book belongs to two collections. We may revisit this, allowing members to set colors for their collections, but it will depend on other priorities, and we’ll never be able to squeeze all the information in collections into colors alone. For what they are, however, we hope they’re useful.

See more information and discussion.

Labels: collections, new features

11 Comments:

  1. esther says:

    This is definitely a very welcome addition to the collections – I was starting to regret having put my wishlist on LT, as there was no way to distinguish them from books I own, except going to the collection itself or the detail page of the book. Thank you!

    Now if you could also change this in "you own X books of author Y" etc…,

  2. Library Hag says:

    Come here baby, I want to kiss you!!

  3. GreyHead says:

    Is that palate or palette – a question of taste I guess?

  4. Eliza K. says:

    seconding what Esther said: if you could change this in authors' pages too it would be fantastic!

  5. wandering_star says:

    Yet another fantastic addition to LT that I didn't know I wanted until I saw it! How do you do it?

  6. eawsmom says:

    This is great! Would it be asking too much to have the legend appear on the series statistics page, since I may not remember what color stands for what status?

  7. Bibliobeck says:

    Ha. Have to agree with wandering star. I love it!

  8. Anonymous says:

    How can one designate owned but not read?

  9. LLOEW Book Club says:

    Since this change I've gotten error boxes in the "what's being read" area on my homepage — and it's driving me nuts!

  10. Hutch says:

    We think this is a great idea ( seeing i do all our stuff in here it's not a problem for us, with him being color blind) but the colors are close enough that someone that is color blind or color deficient maybe not always be able to tell between the color. Any way of doing different shapes or bolder/ more distinct color?

  11. Tim says:

    Thanks for the note. I wish I could help you here. Here's why we can't.

    1. Alt text would be best, but the way it's implemented technologically—bullet backgrounds—doesn't allow that easily. We'd have to redo everything.

    2. Shapes… I just think it would look terrible.

    3. People complained about the brightness as it is. Indeed, if I have some time, I was planning to take them down a notch.

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