Comparison system
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[edit] Design
When comparing software, you'd be able to easily switch the grouping between group by software name or group by feature -- with a single click. (Probably would try to do it client-side to make it as responsive as possible.)
Even when grouped by software name, if you saw a feature that interested you and you wanted to see how that particular feature compared between the product you were viewing and all the other options, you could always click that feature and it would expand in-line (probably via Ajax), to show a by-feature comparison.
[edit] What would I/you use it for?
To do comparisons between items in these (and other) lists/databases:
- Software development tracking systems
- Ruby libraries
- Rails plugins and libraries
- Different models of a product you're thinking of buying (a car, a computer, etc.)
- Different cities you're thinking of moving to
- Different political candidates/platforms
- ...
Anything really ... anything that can be compared.
[edit] Use it to input comparison decisions / rankings (data is not just read-only)
In addition to being able to display existing metadata about two products side-by-side, it will also allow data entry using a similar (the same?) interface...
Of course it would let you create new fields/attributes that you want to compare for all all selected products, and then start quickly populating those fields for all the compared items (in addition to simply viewing/changing existing attributes)...
It should be pretty free form, and allow for such simplistic data such as "of these 3 products, this one has the best implementation of this feature and this other one has the worst implementation".
Actually, this "relative preference"/ranking feature would probably simply be a layer on top of all fields that you are comparing... Things like price rankings would automatically be calculated for you, with the cheapest price in bold with a green background perhaps. But other things you would have to rank manually. Like "which system implemented this feature the best?". Maybe just have a single-click 5-star rating system for each field. But that's a rating, not a ranking. So we could show instead their effective ranking, giving each one a unique number in the sequence; to promote an item, maybe do some kind of drag and drop (drag on top of the one you want to promote it above?)...
Question: If you input your ranking of 3 of 15 items, the other 12 would still be unranked. How would they appear if you then did a comparison with those items?
We could put some kind of indicator indicating that they have no ranking so please enter one right now (with an in-place editor, of course). We could also assume that their ranking is simply the mean of the other rankings (right in the middle) until those rankings are indicated. Or maybe everything would start out in last place until promoted??
[edit] [Examples (category)] of good comparison sites/pages
Genii Software | WebEditors (http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/WebEditors).
