Fiddly to add the current node to common ancestors

[jaredkhan]

Sometimes I find I've done a search (and maybe it's taken me a while to find precisely the node I was looking for) and then I decide that I want to do a common ancestors view of this and something else. At the moment, I have to manually search for this node again in the common ancestors view, which feels like an extra step.

[jaredkhan]

Some possible avenues for making this flow easier:

• A 'recent places' area in the Popular Places dropdown showing, say, the 5 most recent nodes that you have tapped on in search results
• When the common ancestor view is open, add a button to the sufficiently zoomed-in nodes that would add that node to the common ancestor search (rough mockup below)
  • this approach has the benefit that it works for nodes that you've found outside of the search function
• automatically add the current node when you open the common ancestors view

[davidebbo]

In general, I like the idea of having an easily accessible list of 'recent places'. This would be useful beyond the common ancestor use case.

[lentinj]

add a button to the sufficiently zoomed-in nodes that would add that node to the common ancestor search (rough mockup below)

Whilst it's something that comes up a lot, I've come out reasonably anti adding-extra-buttons to the leaves. In an ideal world I think the leaf should be one link hotspot, but for that we need the summary page: https://github.com/OneZoom/OZtree/issues/865

But the recent places idea is really good, we should definitely do that. We could have:

• Recently clicked on search results
• Recently clicked on nodes/leaves
• ~Large visible nodes on-screen (covering the use-case of the common-ancestor buttons)

Rather than bombarding the user with lists, it may be nicer to combine them with a do-the-right-thing heuristic, but I'm not sure what that might be off the top of my head.

I don't think these have to be common-ancestor-specific either. Being able to leap back to what you were looking at a few minutes ago sounds pretty useful.

[davidebbo]

Rather than bombarding the user with lists, it may be nicer to combine them with a do-the-right-thing heuristic, but I'm not sure what that might be off the top of my head.

Maybe 'Popular places' becomes 'Popular and recent places'? Just having a 5-long MRU at the top of the list would go a long way.

[lentinj]

Maybe 'Popular places' becomes 'Popular and recent places'?

Yeah, this definitely makes sense, the popular places should age out as we find out what you're actually interested in.

But how to combine this list with what's currently visible isn't so obvious. Maybe there isn't a way, and it should stay separate.

[jaredkhan]

Thanks for the responses. Agreed that adding buttons to the nodes has obvious downsides.

One thought on the recent places thing is that it could be similar to whatever is pushing to the browser history at the moment but filtered to just named nodes.

[lentinj]

it could be similar to whatever is pushing to the browser history at the moment

There's a timer that records a new URL, provided the new URL is "different enough". We certainly could redirect these into the history easily enough, but it may well end up recording uninteresting nodes that you're just passing by.

[jaredkhan]

The recent places idea is implemented in https://github.com/OneZoom/OZtree/pull/902