DVDpedia: Stat Items as Sidebar Selections

[joel]

The statistics feature is very slick and neat.

It would be useful to allow quicker access to some of the more common stats.

I am thinking a new library sidebar item for common stats.
You could pick your favorites (media, genre, director, writer, composer, actor, tags, etc) and that stat would be displayed.

This would do a couple of things:
- the stats would appear faster, because it only has to calculate one stat
- you could more quickly find the stat you were interested in and not have to scroll through so many results
- you could display more results for that stat in a single window: currently stats with lots of key values stretch horizontally out for ever, but if you were only displaying one stat, you could use the whole screen to display more results

[sjk]

Isn't it currently possible to get the same (or similar) results by creating Smart Collections for stat types of interest?

[joel]

Not that I see.

How does a smart collection showing "Clint Eastwood" equal the stats view of "Directors"?

[sjk]

I've probably misunderstood your suggestion.

Could you describe what you'd like displayed after selecting, for example, a "Director" stat collection in the sidebar? Would it be a subset of that info from what's currently in the Statistics view, displayed vertically instead of horizontally?

I was thinking that a "Director <is not> <empty>" Smart Collection to match all the director names, with selected columns to display in the List view and sorted by the Director column, would be similar. One difference is it wouldn't be sortable by the count of each director name, like you see in the Statistics view. But there's so much more info available just being in the List view so I'm thinking along the lines of some extension of it that could effectively and powerfully subsume the Statistics view.

The current Statistics view seems more separate from than integrated with the other views.

For me this relates to a general issue of filtering methods, like I briefly mentioned a couple years ago:

Also, I've been looking for easier ways to temporarily view different fields/values for multiple entries. Adding/removing columns to the list view, especially with several regular/smart collections, has been tedious. More generally, I'd like to search/filter/view metadata and values to simply finding entries of interest on-the-fly.

[joel]

Could you describe what you'd like displayed after selecting, for example, a "Director" stat collection in the sidebar? Would it be a subset of that info from what's currently in the Statistics view, displayed vertically instead of horizontally?

Yes a subset. In your example, it would be just the Director stats.
It would fill both vertically and horizontally, making full use of the screen space.
And you could create an entry in the side bar for each individual stat that you are most interested in.
A simple click on the stat entry in the sidebar would reveal that stat.

Again the advantages are: speed in calculation, and instantly going to exactly the stat you are interested in, and seeing more results for that category at once.

But there's so much more info available just being in the List view so I'm thinking along the lines of some extension of it that could effectively and powerfully subsume the Statistics view.

But there are no stats.
The is no (compact, easy to read) visual indicator of the patterns.
And list view is only a click a way - for example if I see I have 24 movies directed by Clint Eastwood, and I want the list view of that info, all I have to do is click on his name (like in the existing stat view).

If that doesn't clear it up for you, I could mock it up.

[sjk]

If that doesn't clear it up for you, I could mock it up.

It's clearer now - thanks. If anything, I wish I was competent to offer a mockup that would be clearer than struggling to describe.

Seems we agree the meta-issue is that the current Statistics pseudo-view can be unwieldy. You got me interested in pondering other methods of referencing that information in addition to what you've suggested. Let's look at it from here:

A simple click on the stat entry in the sidebar would reveal that stat.

Which collection(s) would that apply to? Currently, View > Statistics (Command-K) operates on the selected collection and the Options sheet controls which stats are displayed… globally, on every Statistics page. Being able to save specific (de)selections on that Options sheet as Smart Statistics Collections, with one-click sidebar access, is one way this might be implemented:

And you could create an entry in the side bar for each individual stat that you are most interested in.

That would be flexible and satisfying enough for me, even if results were displayed in their current format.

[joel]

Which collection(s) would that apply to? Currently, View > Statistics (Command-K) operates on the selected collection and the Options sheet controls which stats are displayed… globally, on every Statistics page.

I didn't think of that!

An oversight on my part. You are right, sometimes occasionally, you might want to run stats on a subset of all records....
(although the reason I didn't think of it is because I very rarely do that!)

That definitely complicates the interface part.

I suppose the easy (but maybe not elegant) way to do it would be to foot about my sidebar item, and instead implement it through a menu.

So this "new vision" would be a Statistics menu (or a Statistics sub men in the View menu).
The top item would be the current stats view - an overview of all values for the movies selected, drawn like the current stats view is drawn.
Then there could be individual values listed. Selecting one of the individual values ("Directors", as an example) from the Statistics sub men would just display the stats for that value, using the whole screen, vertically and horizontally.

That way all stats could be displayed for all records or any current selection of records.

Menus aren't as cool and sexy and trendy as sidebar items, but it would work.



PS - I am almost always interested in stats across all of my records, so the sidebar implementation would also be acceptable.

[Nora]

Interesting discussion, thanks for fleshing this out a bit. One thing which we have on our to do list for the future that might go into the same direction is a cloud tag window. We had planned to only include the Tags field but there's no reason why other fields shouldn't be able to be included as well. Either giving users an option to switch between fields or have them all together in the same window.
We'll add this to the (very rough) sketch we have of this feature and see what we come up with for the future. Already the new filter feature we added to the Details view is a move into that direction.