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We originally had the market values for midnights presented as a set of nested drop-down menus (in the tab _ CurrentOpenTrades_ CurrentOpenTrades). We replaced it with the table in the Quotes page. There were several reasons for this change.
First of all, we changed the way MidnightExchange ran in order to more accurately reflect the market. Instead of showing all the bid/asks for a midnight, their values, and their proposing parties, we chose to display only the best bid/asks (thus, the highest bid and lowest asks) and to preserve anonymity. This was an important and correct decision. The typical rational user need not see all the bids/asks on a midnight if s/he is seeking to either buy the labor for it, or sell his/her labor for it; rather, s/he only wants to see the best deal that s/he can get. Anything extra information would detract from both efficiency (more reading/scrolling) and visibility (harder to distinguish the important information from the information that the server only needs to know).
This means that, since only the best bid/ask is being displayed, there is a constant amount of information; furthermore, we limited the maximum bid/ask values to $99.99 USD. It was only natural, then, to use the table: the rigidness of the boundaries would not create a problem, since the content is always fixed in length. Also, since the schedule itself is a table, we took advantage of consistency to positively affect learnability. The new layout is more efficient, learnable, and aesthetically more pleasing than the older drop-down menu ridden design.
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Implementation
Describe the internals of your implementation, but keep the discussion on a high level. Discuss important design decisions you made in the implementation. Also discuss how implementation problems may have affected the usability of your interface.
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