all. I'm designing an online form builder (think Forms in Google Docs / Spreadsheets). The functionality is complete, but I'm not happy with the sorting capabilities. Everyone that I have done usability tests with (five or so, including myself) didn't realize that the items could be sorted.
This leaves me with a question: Is there a best practice / most intuitive way to present a list to be manually sorted?
As a few examples:
Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Forms:
Google's method is to have almost no indication that the items in their Forms can be sorted. They use cursor: move; in their CSS to indicate that it is moveable, but nothing more.
jQuery UI:
jQueryUI's Sortable is fairly similar. Almost no interface, save for a double arrow on the left hand side. This is what I am currently using which is not being recognized by users.
Up/down buttons:
I can't think of any examples, but I have seen sorting using [+] and [-] buttons. This seemed to be easy for users to pick up on, but meant the possibility of requiring n-1 clicks to get from the bottom to the top.
Answer
Displaying a "grip" pattern at one side of the item, combined with the "move" cursor is fairly obvious to moderately savvy users.
Up/Down arrows are an option too, but that obviously falls short of powerful when you can only move one position at a time.
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