This discussion is kinda related to my incessant questioning last week about why 'correct' data is shown by default.
A big start would be to explain the two major features of the UI: what the colours mean (actually writing "a green area means: blah, blah") and what the squares and circles mean. And with that I mean explaining on the webpage, not here in the mailing list. What you've created is a very powerful and useful tool, and I think these few small tweaks to the UI would make it far more intuitive to use. Oh, and an option to turn off all the 'correct' green squares/circles - surely that's just wasting resources for the average user? Obviously, if you're just aiming to reach programmers and power users, then leave as-is! Thanks Tim --- On Sun, 8/8/10, Robert Scott <li...@humanleg.org.uk> wrote: From: Robert Scott <li...@humanleg.org.uk> Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] Yet more musical chairs updates. To: talk-gb@openstreetmap.org Date: Sunday, 8 August, 2010, 23:59 On Sunday 08 August 2010, Dave F. wrote: > It redraws all the different colour circles on the map (supposedly > searching the database each time) & list specific data on the right for > the circle that was under the double click - pointless if you just want > to zoom in. Oh! Yes - this is intended, and what's more it's vital that it keeps refreshing the view. When showing a non-authoritative view, the results it shows is highly dependent on the view's bounding box. It shows the first 1024 results. Obviously, it will show the first 1024 results in the area you're looking at. As you zoom in, it will adaptively (every two zoomlevels) increase the level of detail. This is necessary to keep showing the user a relevant amount of detail. You can't have people zooming all the way in to milton keynes and it still only show you the one little circle that was visible at the country level. Or do you expect people to have to manually click refresh every time they want more results? How would they discover that? More textual instructions? There's limited space on the panel. The non-authoritative views are only meant as a rough overview before you get zoomed in enough. > Yeah, but you're looking at it from the perspective of the person who's > programmed it & knows it's every nuance. I'm looking at it from the view of a power user. > Try looking at it from the point of view of the newbies - they'll want > to zoom in to their local town, where they'll understand what they're > looking at before deciphering all the options. > > The titles you use don't offer clarity for them. Musical Chairs, as a > prime example, gives no indication of what the program does. No, I didn't consult a focus group before I slapped that name infront of it if that's what you're asking. > Instead of a simple Help you've got What? & even Algorithm - who, of > those that want to *use* your web page need to know how it was > programmed? If somebody really does, they can email you. It was written back when this stuff really was just an algorithm and I found a couple of free hours to write up an explanation. It's the only page I had on it - so I included a link to it. > Under What? you give half the information required. Instead of > explaining the differences in colours you just say "It is coloured > according to whether it has a similarly named and placed counterpart in > OSM and how good the agreement is between them." Not specifically > helpful. It's also out of date. That's the problem with writing help etc. It goes out of date as soon as you change things. Every time you add more help/documentation, you increase the burden of keeping it up to date. The trick is to _try_ and make it all as obvious and discoverable as possible. That was my idea with the little hoverable question mark. > Why does it start at a zoom level that includes half of Northern Europe? Because when you tell openlayers to show a view including a certain bbox (GB) it picks the highest zoomlevel it can that will show the whole thing. You'll find that the next zoomlevel up will cut off part of GB. > This is a half decent utility, to needs some teaks to make it user friendly. You are expecting too much from me. This is something I've hacked together in odd spare hours and half hours I've found now and then. Writing decent help would be great. But I primarily see this as a power user's tool that people who fix a lot of things can use to... er... fix a lot of things. If someone wants to do a whole UI survey on it, that would be lovely. Unfortunately this is how a lot of OSM software spends its life. Looked at JOSM lately? robert. ps- Patches are welcome. _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
_______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
