Choosle: Compare, Convince and Win

Selling your expertise as a freelancer can be a tough challenge. You need to quickly convince your potential client that you can provide the best solution, no matter how the project's requirements will develop. With Choosle you can communicate your ideas and solutions in a quick and compact way.

As a usability and interaction design expert, Reto Lämmler (58rocks GmbH) successfully pitched for a project at Sunrise Communications. During the pitch phase, he was asked about prototypes and data storage. He came up with several good ideas, but they all depended on the actual requirements of the project itself. Since the actual requirements weren’t clear at this point in time, it was difficult to suggest one bullet proof solution. In order to convince the client about his expertise, he created a comparison table visualizing different ways to solve the problem.

Using Choosle, he collected suitable solutions and compared them by different criteria: Data Storage for Rapid Prototyping. The weights of these criteria reflect his vague, but meaningful perception of the likely requirements. The Choosle provided an excellent base for discussion and helped to convince the client on his expertise.

With this clear communication effort Reto was able to prevail against his competitors and won the contract.

Release 0.20: Grid Redesign

Grid Redesign
The rework of the Choosle comparison table appears cleaner and moves even closer to the popular view of a comparison matrix with the factors placed in the left fixed column. The rendering performance of the new grid has increased considerably and allows you to browse also bigger Choosles on less powerful machines. A toolbar in the top left corner of the grid allows you to directly access major features.

Row/Column Swap
By default options are represented as columns and the factors, criteria as rows. With the swap feature you can transpose this representation and see the options as rows with their arguments in the columns per factor.

This allows you to quickly compare the arguments of one factor for all the options. It also shows Choosles with many options and few factors more elegantly.

Compact View
Many detailed view settings have been summaries to one compact view, accessible via the toolbar.

The summaries and factor titles for the arguments are hidden and only the first characters of the argument texts are shown.
The swapped, compact view replaces the option ranking list and allows to quickly reorder, add, remove the options.

Sort
Another toolbar feature is the one-click row sort.

Factors are sorted by their weight...

and in the swapped view the options by their score to form a ranking list.

Release 0.19

Clipboard
You probably know how to copy some text selection to the clipboard and then paste it at some other place. While this works across some applications, it is bound to the system it is running on. So we call this the system clipboard. Browsers seem to be afraid of allowing a Web application to access this system clipboard (w3.org/...), so we have built our own, the Choosle Clipboard.

In addition to select and copy simple text with the system clipboard you can now copy a complete argument, a factor or an option. First select the source, press Ctrl-C (or Cmd-C on the Mac), then select the target and press Ctrl-V (or Cmd-V). A faster alternative to select/copy/paste the title, summary and rating individually.

Copy Link
The Import Bookmarklet has been extended to copy the URL of a page with it's title and an optional text selection to the Choosle Clipboard.

When pasted into a Choosle or one of it's elements the link is simply added to the corresponding text.

Embed on a Web Site

Add a read-only, up-to-date view of your Choosle to your Web page, Blog or Wiki.

This example compares some basic alternatives with Choosle.
Please let us know when you need another style or form of presentation!

Fixed Factors
They have been around for a while already and are now set by default. The column with the factors stays fixed at it's position while you scroll horizontally, but follows your scrolling vertically.
In your settings you can switch the factor column back to being movable like the other columns.

Release 0.18

Two Menus Only

With read-only access you will probably like to "comment" a Choosle or to work on your own "copy" of it.

While with edit access you can work on the Choosle directly and the "save" command becomes more important than the "copy" one.

As the administrator of your own Choosle you might want to "share" it rather than writing comments your content.

Of course all the other menus are still available as sub-menus of the "more" pull-down.

New Share Dialog
After two previous versions (June 2011 and August 2011) the new sharing dialog has become more powerful, yet still easy to use.

You can now share your Choosle with your friends directly. No special link necessary.

Of course you can still generate special links to share with any group of people.

Who ever receives such a link has access as specified here, independent of his login.

Shortcuts allow you to quickly send Choosle messages via Facebook, Email or Twitter.

Simply click on the corresponding shortcut image and a message with the link to your Choosle will be prepared for you.

You can also try to use your own Email client (depends on your system setup).


Authors and Editors
Now the author and all the editors are listed next to the title of the Choosle. Also the date shows the time of the last change instead of the creation date. The tool-tip still shows the author and the creation time.

Release 0.17

Facebook Login
Until now you could login via your Google, Yahoo,... or another OpenID account. Now you can also use your Facebook account.

So when you are on Facebook regularly, you now have simple and quick access to Choosle.

Choosle Login
If you don't have a Google, Yahoo,... or Facebook account or you just don't want to use one of them, you can register now at Choosle directly.

You can connect other accounts later (see following chapter).

Connect Accounts
When you are logged in with your Google account, you can connect your Facebook account to the same user settings in Choosle. Of course this also works the other way round or with any other account.

This way you can browse all your Choosles and see your settings applied, independent how you log into the system.