Ideas - how to simplify view for new users?

[keyserj]

Diagrams are pretty hard to read if you're unfamiliar with Ameliorate, especially if they're larger diagrams.

It'd be useful if

1. changes could make diagrams easier to read, or
2. there was a simplified view that could be shown by default.

This ticket's purpose is to organize all ideas that can make it easier for Ameliorate to be understood by new users, and provide a place to discuss these ideas. Concrete ideas that should be implemented should have their own tickets and be linked to this one.

Existing related tickets:

• 478

[keyserj]

Idea: limit shown diagram to X layers from the selected node (solution/problem/etc)

Good:

• showing just a few layers can help provide a quick high-level for the user, and the user can click to navigate deeper layers as they want

Bad:

• Quick Views already allow the topic creator to manually set this up
• topics vary in breadth (nodes per layer), so it seems like there wouldn't be a good default for all topics (e.g. a topic with 1-2 nodes per layer but 4-5 layers might make more sense to show more layers at once)
• topics vary as to which view provides the best high-level; some might be best starting from a problem, some might be best from a solution, some might be best from the criteria table

[keyserj]

Kialo has some great UX that's intuitive for new users, maybe inspiration can be taken from that.

Guided voting: shows one claim at a time, and another is shown after that one is scored

[keyserj]

Kialo's sunburst navigation is a nice visual to convey depth of layers from one root node

• since there's no clear root in Ameliorate (e.g. could be multiple problems, multiple solutions), and nodes can have X parents/children, this visual wouldn't exactly work to show the whole diagram
• perhaps googling for different concise visuals to view a whole graph could be good
• potentially something similar could be done except with problems on the left, solutions on the right, details in between, and all nodes/edges are just replaced by tiles of color that can be hovered to show the node's text, like cars-going-too-fast could be represented like this:

[keyserj]

Kialo's tree navigation is also nice way of contextualizing where you are in the diagram

• Ameliorate could just show a mini/no-text version of the graph, with hiding any nodes not between the selected node and the root problems/solutions

[keyserj]

Kialo's simple 2-column view is easy for new users to navigate:

• but Ameliorate uses a graph, not a tree, so could something like this even be done?
  • potentially a view could show the selected node's parents, siblings, and children, and a minimap solution (like sunburst/tree navigation) could be sufficient for context; and selecting a different node would move it to the center row and show its own neighbors
  • e.g. with cars-going-too-fast if "30 day implementation" component is selected, might look like this