Some other default order than alphabetical

[dimaqq]

Now that the database is more than one page, and in fact as soon as it's longer than a screenful, I believe the default order should no longer be alphabetical.

Current state is is that Ai/Aiko/Alina are visible, but Trista/Tutti/Victoria are completely invisible.

[ann-kilzer]

We're adding search right now #195 . What other sort would you suggest? Perhaps the ability to choose alphabetical / reverse alphabetical would help?

[dimaqq]

Well this is a tough one, to be honest. This issues has been addressed in facebook messages and google hangouts in the past, usually one of two ways:

1. most-recent (conversations) first, or
2. limit number of items to visible size, select most important (e.g. search relevance), then display alphabetically

(reversing the order is still unfair to those show names start wth K,L,M; they are never first).

One option is... if/when there is search, the initial (unsearched) display can be a random sample.

[ann-kilzer]

These aren't messages though, it's just a list of people, so the only sense of recency is date of addition to the system. We originally ordered that way but it put us cofounders first, which was not what we wanted. I suppose it could be reversed and put new people first. 🤔

A few points:

• We don't want the same speakers to get selected over and over, and raising priority based on more public interest could do that. We're hoping to help both seasoned and first-time public speakers find opportunities.
• Giving an alphabetical ordering helps people search by name, as there's a predictable order without looking through everything. If a user is returning to the site and looking for someone they previously saw, there is a clear way to find them.
• Our main user story for event organizers is something like this: "As an event organizer, I wish to recruit women experts in a given region of Japan to speak at my event on a specific topic." So we assume that just anyone on the list might not be a match for the event organizer; however, I could understand how they might get tired after scrolling through several pages.

Really the search functionality should add visibility to more candidates by making it easy to narrow down results by topic and location to a couple of candidates.

[tuttiq]

This is a good discussion. I think search and filtering will definitely solve most of the issues, but I guess in the future future (not necessarily anytime soon) we could consider changing the landing page to a "dashboard" style, with multiple snippets of different sub-lists (Top speakers for "Tech", Newly registered, First-time speakers looking for opportunities, etc), each snippet can show 5~10 names and a Show more button that takes you to the master list with the filters and sorting applied.