Easier to access market management

A couple months ago we added hover menus to our "management" market listings. Those are the markets listed when you click "manage markets". You see that link when you are an admin or your Inkling marketplace allows users to make their own.

The hover menus allow us to hide some of the repetitiveness of the user interface. There's a lot of things you can do with a market these days (edit/cash out/suspend/trader performance/delete/etc.), and a couple more coming real soon. All of those actions translate into some kind of link or button to make it happen. So instead of having 5 or 6 buttons on every row listing a market, the hover menu keeps each row more concise and easier to read.

Last night we consolidated our market listings. So now if you are an admin managing a bunch of markets or a regular user who created a few markets, whenever you find your market in a list (search, the different sorts, the home tab, etc.), you'll have the manage menu available to you on those markets you are managing.



This gets rid of the unfortunate use case where you need to search for a market and then cash it out. Before you would have needed to search for the market, click the market name to get to it's market page, then click edit to get into the management listings containing the market, and then you'd have had your cash-out button available to you.

With last night's change, it's just search for your market and then right there in those listings are your management functions. Fewer clicks. Less pain.

We've also iterated on the look and feel of the menu. Now it is higher contrast with the rest of the page so it's easier to spot.

It's also inline with the top of the row it belongs to (before it was lined up with the middle of the row). This makes it easier to anchor to a specific market in a list. So if the market is right at the top of the page, now half of the menu isn't going to be hidden by the browser's frame (i.e. outside the viewport).

We also are keenly aware that these management functions also need to be much more integrated with a normal market page. So when you are viewing a market, you can edit and cash out things right from that page rather than having to jump back out to a list of markets to get to this menu. We'll have this improved very soon.

Hope everyone had a relaxing holiday and is already enjoying 2009.