A common misconception among new users is that our time slider’s range is fixed, and therefore we only welcome data about the past 200 years: https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/issues/issues/647#issue-2033370689. Even if a user is aware of our true ambitions, it can be quite inconvenient to have to manipulate the date range using the dropdowns and text fields just to go slightly beyond 200 years ago.
We should accommodate the user by automatically adjusting the range to better fit the selected date. As the user drags the knob to the left and it reaches the end of the track, they should be able to continue dragging the knob by holding down on the mouse button, changing the range to start earlier and earlier. The start date’s rate of change could increase exponentially, so that dragging past the end for several seconds could provide access to dates many centuries ago. Similarly, dragging the knob past the right end of the track should move the end date later in time. Maybe holding down on the knob in place could shrink the timespan so that the user can scrub more granularly, as in QuickTime.
With these “overscroll” adjustments, the user could accidentally wind up with a very large timespan before they realize what’s going on. To mitigate this issue, overscroll should only kick in after a second or so, or it should start very slow. The effect should be similar to what happens when you drag an object past the viewport in a vector graphics tool such as Inkscape or PowerPoint. The date readouts should also update immediately. Even better, we could add some tick marks so the user can clearly observe that the scale is changing. Each tick mark could even reflect the presence of data on the map from a given year: #649.
A new user may not realize they can overscroll in the first place. To aid discovery, we could automatically overscroll by a small amount after the user finishes dragging. By sliding on its own, the knob would invite the user to explore times beyond the defaults. However, this adjustment would potentially interfere with the user’s attempts to set a precise date range for animation. Maybe we could have the date range “snap” to nice round dates that the user is likely to want as start and end dates? This is something we could explore separately, once we have a better feel for how well the basic overscroll is working.
A common misconception among new users is that our time slider’s range is fixed, and therefore we only welcome data about the past 200 years: https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/issues/issues/647#issue-2033370689. Even if a user is aware of our true ambitions, it can be quite inconvenient to have to manipulate the date range using the dropdowns and text fields just to go slightly beyond 200 years ago.
We should accommodate the user by automatically adjusting the range to better fit the selected date. As the user drags the knob to the left and it reaches the end of the track, they should be able to continue dragging the knob by holding down on the mouse button, changing the range to start earlier and earlier. The start date’s rate of change could increase exponentially, so that dragging past the end for several seconds could provide access to dates many centuries ago. Similarly, dragging the knob past the right end of the track should move the end date later in time. Maybe holding down on the knob in place could shrink the timespan so that the user can scrub more granularly, as in QuickTime.
With these “overscroll” adjustments, the user could accidentally wind up with a very large timespan before they realize what’s going on. To mitigate this issue, overscroll should only kick in after a second or so, or it should start very slow. The effect should be similar to what happens when you drag an object past the viewport in a vector graphics tool such as Inkscape or PowerPoint. The date readouts should also update immediately. Even better, we could add some tick marks so the user can clearly observe that the scale is changing. Each tick mark could even reflect the presence of data on the map from a given year: #649.
A new user may not realize they can overscroll in the first place. To aid discovery, we could automatically overscroll by a small amount after the user finishes dragging. By sliding on its own, the knob would invite the user to explore times beyond the defaults. However, this adjustment would potentially interfere with the user’s attempts to set a precise date range for animation. Maybe we could have the date range “snap” to nice round dates that the user is likely to want as start and end dates? This is something we could explore separately, once we have a better feel for how well the basic overscroll is working.