Task #6348
closedStory #6330: Address feedback on MetacatUI features and usability
Address feedback from Carl Boettiger
0%
Description
Hi KNB team,
writing my impressions after a quick test drive of the new KNB interface.
Testing on Google Chrome 31.0.1650.63, Ubuntu 13.10
1) Impressions, issues:
Really slick, awesome interface. Great work. I love the auto-complete/matched list boxes on the filter. A few minor comments:
- This is probably me being stupid, but I expected to be able to find this file: https://cn.dataone.org/cn/v1/object/knb-lter-hfr.205.4 on the KNB. Searching by author, identifier, etc, doesn't seem to give me any results.
- After entering a search query and hitting enter, the search box is cleared before the results appear. It's strange not seeing my search terms still in the box, and for a moment makes me think my search didn't happen. With map off this is fast enough not to be so confusing.
- Mapping feature is very nice, fast, responsive. Took me a while to find the hide-map option (long enough to originally request it as a feature -- whoops!)
- Filter box shows horizontal and vertical scroll-bars even though it doesn't scroll
- Filter box appears partly covered by the "hide map" and "share data", particularly when map is open (at least on my smallish laptop screen). I would actually remove/relocate these buttons entirely.
- I would have put the "filter" option attached to the search results box, or as an "advanced search" option? Took me a while to realize what/where this option was.
- the "share data" slide out is cool, but become annoying as it pops up unintentionally when I have the mouse in the filter-box area, and it isn't where I'd click to share my data (The "share" button on the top menu being 100 times more obvious...)
- It is unclear how the map is handling bounding boxes or ranges of many sites, since it appears that each dataset is represented as a single pin in the map.
- Layout of metadata summaries looks very sharp. However, blank boxes often appear -- it seems more logical to simply omit the boxes when they have no value entered. (e.g. attribute information here: https://knb.ecoinformatics.org/m/#view/wolkovich.33.3)
- I was a bit surprised to find coverage metadata appear only after the data table metadata, especially when there are many data tables: e.g. https://knb.ecoinformatics.org/m/#view/doi:10.5063/AA/wolkovich.3.16
- In general I like whitespace, but some of the coverage metadata appears too spaced out to read easily. In particular, taxonomic coverage would be much easier to read in a tighter table than in boxes of "Classification" with the words "Rank Name" and "Rank Value" appearing again and again (I realize that EML's taxonomicCoverage isn't always just rank name-value pairs, but when it is it would be preferable to display them in a more natural layout).
- The taxon search can be misleading: if the EML only lists genus/species name, say, but I search for a higher taxonomy, I don't get results that should otherwise be matches. (e.g. this file https://knb.ecoinformatics.org/m/#view/esa.46.5 does not come up in a search for taxon: Sarraceniaceae.
- The URL doesn't show the data set I am viewing, or the search/filter terms I have selected. (If I visit the file by clicking on the DOI, I do get an informative URL, just not when browsing to it via the interface).
2) Suggestions for future features:
I wonder if you might consider browsing by other Coverage axes -- e.g. how about showing the data along a global timeline, or distributed across a tree of life?
Thanks again for making such a great interface. Apologies for the earlier email without the review content, and let me know if I should be sending this information to something other than metacat-dev.
Carl