Time Ascending/Descending should contextually change to facilitate understanding

kf

When using sort by / order and the user selects "Time" the entries at the bottom should contextually change (or have values added to the side of them) of:

Newest first
Oldest first

This would add value to the UI and help the UX generally to make an easily confusable point much simpler at a quick glance.

kf

@Vlad what's the status of this? I'm still hearing and seeing confusion with this. Would be very nice to change the verbiage since it's really a small thing to do, but helps UX very much.

Vlad

kf I agree it is a small thing we can change.

Recast

Fantastic!!!!

kf

❤️ Thank you @Luis! How soon until this is active

kf

I see the changelog has been updated, but I still the other verbiage that is unclear. I am sorry if I wasn't clear and while the new results seem to show newest for sure by default, I think the verbiage should still be updated:

example

jacobwinters

When we went to make the change, we noticed that the images and videos tabs already had the same functionality, but they called it sorting by "recency" instead of by "time", and that "ascending"/"descending" are less confusing with "recency" than they are with "time". We decided to resolve the confusion by making the web search page match the image and video search pages. Do you still find it unclear with the recent changes?

kf

The problem is that there is an unnecessary mental load for users during this user experience when they have to process "Ascending" vs "Descending". These terms are simply not natural in context of anything outside of a physical direction that gives relative context.

It can be readily argued that using "Ascending" and "Descending" for any of the Sort functions presents a challenge any user outside of a software developer... And even for software developers there is an additional measure of processing that is needed.

So while Recency is good, the Ascending/Descending should be modified to convey natural meaning. I would also challenge your UX team to expand this thinking for the other functionality as well so as to improve the product and UX further...

Recast

I think changing it to "recency" is worse. It's best to use simple language that everyone understands. I think "[order by] recency", "ascending", and "descending" are really uncommon words that take time to think about (if people know them at all), whereas "[order by] time", "newest first", and "oldest first" like in the original proposal are much easier and quicker to understand.

For me personally I would much prefer the options to be called newest first and oldest first.

kf

Thank you for resolving this. It is much more intuitive now for folks.