SRGDamia1
commented
8 years ago Although it's nice to see such snappy search results and faceted navigation, we do have some ways to go before the site is usable and appealing. Some important functionality and content is inconsistent, confusing, or broken at the moment. You are probably aware of most of these issues, but it seems worth spelling them out so that we can prioritize, brainstorm solutions, and assign tasks to specific folks. For example, we need to explore ideas for better formatting of the Description/Abstract - adding returns, bolding, etc. And explore how easy it is to show different fields in the expanded/detailed views for a single record.
Some observations and initial ideas:
- DESCRIPTIONS ARE HARD TO READ The Descriptions/abstracts for the CMS entries are hard to read. We need to explore ideas. Maybe find ways for better formatting of the Description/Abstract field - adding returns, bolding, etc. Or maybe shortening the Description/Abstract field and putting additional content elsewhere in XML?
- "OPEN" LINK IS BROKEN The "Open" link for each record is not working yet.
- JSON IS INCOMPLETE The JSON version of metadata is missing most of the ISO content
- METADATA ARE NOT DISPLAYED FOR NON-CMS RECORDS Some/all? of the non-CMS records have no visible description or other fields upon selection, despite those fields being in the dublin core metadata.
- SOME DISPLAYED FIELDS ARE MISSING CONTENT OR SHOW INCOMPLETE CONTENT Date Published and Creator fields often display "Not available". Constraints field only shows the last of three constraints. Instead of Date Published, we probably just want to show different fields such as Entry Date and Edit Date. For Constraints, we want to either concatenate content in the XML or pull more content into the Geoportal view. How hard is it to show other fields in Geoportal?
- OPEN TOPOGRAPHY FACET NEEDS DELETED We need to delete the Open topography facet for Observatories
- PROJECT LINK SHOULD BE CONSISTENT In the upper right, the " A project of the …" link should consistently say "Critical Zone Observatories", not "Critical Zone Observatories - Search Portal" like it does on the Home page or "Critical Zone Observatory Project" like it does on the About page.
- DISCIPLINE FACETS NOT SO HELPFUL WHEN SUBDIVIDED? I personally don't find it helpful to show 2-3 "Biology Data" facets separated from 8+ "Earth Science Data" facets. But I might be the odd one out. We need to check with a handful of users and get their feedback.
- FACETS COULD BE INCREASED? Although we've talked about how long lists of facets can be hard to work with, let's actually try some out (ie Topic and Field Area). It could work pretty well, given that many folks are likely to click an observatory or a discipline first - which will often drastically shorten the list. And the long lists could be put at the bottom. One interface issue is that an text search - unlike a facet-only search - currently displays all facets even if they have zero results. Can we change that behavior? Can we always remove facets that have zero results? Or maybe just for the long-listed facets? It's probably not critical, as text-first search would still work OK. Worth pondering though.
- DATA CONSISTENCY NEEDS HELP All datasets should at least have the observatories facet and ideally disciplines too. Are there any automated ways we can assign at least observatory to the non-CMS records? And think about long-term plans for triggering harvesting of non-CMS datasets from the CMS and adding in some facets at the same time? Or adding facets to the new versions of display files?
- LOCATION MAP NEEDS HELP If the behavior stays the same as the West Coast oceans website, let's title it "Map View" or similar instead of "Location". With a title of "location", I'd expected a list or map of all locations… not a blank map. Clicking the map to select is not intuitive to me either. I'd expected to be able to click and drag a bounding box to see the records within that box. For me, a better interface would be small static map that starts by showing the locations or areas of all the relevant results. And clicking the map would bring up a full-screen map that would allow easier zooming, subselecting, exploring etc. And each time the search result is smaller, the map would update to show the new locations. If we can't make at least a few improvements, we might want to delete it entirely.
- CONTENT OF "ABOUT" PAGE AND OTHER STATIC PAGES NEEDS WORK We clearly need to spend time on the "static" informational pages. Who is the audience? What do they need? What are our communication goals? What pages and page titles make sense? Does 'Discover | Connect | Inform | About' work well for CZO? We probably want to at least change "Inform" to "Understand" or similar. One key issue is to clearly explain how this data resource differs from others, most especially the CMS datasets…. and clearly link to those resources. We also need to explain how the text search works. For example, searching on two words like 'ground water' is different than quoting the phrase "ground water". Is there any way to do "and" or "or" searches?
- HOME PAGE OPTIONS AND CONTENT NEEDS MORE CONSIDERATION What are the 4 most common or most important searches to try out? And if "groundwater" is one of them, how do we handle 'groundwater' vs 'ground water' vs "ground water"? All four options should consistently have labels that end with "Data", ie "Groundwater Data". The welcome message should probably give more hints about what a Critical Zone is.
- VISUAL DESIGN NEEDS WORK We need a color scheme that better matches the CZO schemes better and won't be mistaken for the original West Coast Oceans. Ditto for CZO logo. Let's also pick mages on home page that show a range of environments and sample types. And let's explore using web fonts that match or better match CZO.
[--- Commented from Asana.com
commenter David Lubinski
---[aa]
In order for visitors to find what they need and enjoy the experience, the site needs quite a bit more work on functionality and aesthetics