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Rothamsted-Ecoinformatics / farm_rothamsted

Custom farmOS features for Rothamsted Research.
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Parent Tracking Issue: Improved user experience #559

Open aislinnpearson opened 1 year ago

aislinnpearson commented 1 year ago

Following the role out of the experiment module, which focused on the data model rather than usability, we were told that, when completed, the information is incredibly useful but it is also hard to find the information you want and the overall system not very intuitive, which makes difficult to use. This as a parent issue to keep track of suggestions and issues for development related to this topic.

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FarmOS Core Issues

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aislinnpearson commented 1 year ago

The below on ideas of how to improve the visualisation and user interaction with the experiment module from one of our scientists:

I was thinking how FarmOS could become easier for folks like me. I also get quite a few others talking to me about their field experiments – I think most sponsors will actually use FarmOS very infrequently, just a few times a year – and it is difficult to find stuff. One thought is on the front page to have just two options: a ‘For Researchers’ button and a ‘For non- researchers’ . Then, after clicking ‘For Researchers’, get options 3 ‘Find my experiment by field’, ‘Find my experiment by code and title’, ‘Find my experiment by sponsor’ – then for field and code, list all the fields, or all the experiments respectively – so I can choose from a list – (often I forget the exact code or title, so I’d rather look at a list than have to type in). A list of sponsors would also be nice – sometimes I want to find someone else's experiment

It is also really important to me to find details of previous experiments, not sure how best – at level 2, could add ‘find previous year's experiments’ or ‘find by harvest year’ – and then after selecting year, get the same options – by code and title, field, sponsor.

What do you think?

I’d also prefer ‘plans’ to be called ‘management plans’ – but I guess you get all sorts of conflicting opinions, would be impossible to incorporate them all!

This is linked to @paul121 idea of creating a Research Dashboard but would extend that idea to include a Commercial dashboard.

As an aside, I do think it is useful to differentiate between 'field plans' and 'management plans' (and maybe study periods)

aislinnpearson commented 4 months ago

Another request here from the arable operators:

"On the dashboard (so as soon as you open FarmOS) please can we have the functionality to find/ search for fields and plant assets."

Within the above context, I'd probably label these as something like 'Find a Field" and "Search for Crop Assets". For fields, you really only need to know the name (or could use the map to search by location, the functionality for which already exists). For crop assets it would be nice to have additional functionality to search for them by field (location), by crop type (wheat, etc), by variety and by season (Autumn 2024, Spring 2025, etc).

Although the point above suggests different tabs for researchers and "non-researchers" what has been requested by the farm staff seems very general to me so I wonder if we either combine these two requests into a single dashboard where you have the map at the top of the page, and below the map the four search fields; one for Fields, one for Crops one for Experiments and one for Management Plans (laid out in such a way that we could expand this in future if there was the need - for example 'find any asset' and 'find any log').

Beneath the map and general search fields, I wonder if we could then have a 'my FarmOS' section which displays the assets you are associated with. For the time being we would limit this to Experiments and Proposals, but in future I could see this as including plant assets and logs - for example, logs that you have entered which have been flagged as 'need review'. The ideal might be if this section was customisable so you can decide what you want to visualise, but that might be a pie in the sky idea... certainly something that would be a more long-term goal (if we find there is the user demand for it).

paul121 commented 4 months ago

Related farmOS issues for improving the render/view pages of entities: