Fawad,
As a user, I like the Airbnb map experience with popups on top of the markers, what about you?
That is much like the default view of popups in Leaflet. This kind of popup supports very little
information, that's why I made a dedicated space for popups. However, we could go with your
suggestion of "view more". We could either open the parent page with "view
more" or fill the search widget as you suggested. I would go with displaying more information
in the search widget. Is that fine with you?
I would say that typical users will want to choose between displaying
information in a popup or over the search results panel, depending on the user
experience they prefer and the amount of information they want to display.
Typically, Google Maps and the Airbnb map have two different approaches with
this respect, and it would be a plus imho to implement the two. Airbnb maps
display popups, they are small indeed, but the image slider lets the user
obtain a significant amount of information. For displaying more information
like hotel schedule, ratings, comments, it's clear that a bigger panel is
useful, like what Google Maps is proposing.
I would go for small popups to start with (version 1.0), with a link to the underlying
XWiki page indeed. Later on, if time permits depending on the priorities we decide, we
could implement 1) a dynamic "more information widget" that enlarges the popup
dynamically, 2) a different interaction mechanism that is similar to the Google Maps one.
Let's add these features as issues in Jira and refine the roadmap while defining the
upcoming versions, what do you think?
Along this line, another improvement (you probably have it in mind) would
be to introduce one or several dedicated sheets for such contextual information
so that it can get easily customized by users with development skills.
I do not think this is required. If a developer wants a custom display for the
popup information, he can create a class sheet and make pages with that sheet
and it will become a map item after adding location object to the page.
It will become a map item indeed, however, let's look closer at what Airbnb is
proposing: they typically manage three sheets:
- One for the item page when displayed individually, for example:
https://up1.xwikisas.com/#0EcYpY5TQvlCAKuWP3AYIw
- One for displaying the item in a list:
https://up1.xwikisas.com/#yYiN8KfeKuy1BqibkgSkAA
- One for displaying the same item in a popup: same link, right side
A customized class sheet would typically get used for the first display as you
envision it, but for the two others, which would be useful for advanced maps
imho, I was considering we could implement a built-in mechanism allowing easy
customization.
Ok, we need to investigate this. I have a preliminary question about this
feature: how come that the URL does not reflect the mode status when hitting
the full screen button the first time? I mean, if I'm not mistaken, when
hitting the button before running any search, the URL remains unchanged, while
the user may want to use that URL to share the map in full screen as is, or to
embed it in full screen in a iframe, so shouldn't this parameter be present? Is
there any difficulty with that? Wouldn't the facet widget reuse that URL
afterwards? Sorry for any possible misunderstanding on my end.
I did not go with this flow because of better performance since a separate
async request will be made for change in each state. What I am doing now is
that I take the map state on search or other events that reload the map
asynchronously.Thanks for your suggestion Stephane. I could update the page by
observing a change in each state. This is a little slow because the map will
have to be reloaded for each state but still a good option.
Ok great, looking forward to testing the new version
Cheers
Stéphane
