architecture-building-systems / CityEnergyAnalyst

The City Energy Analyst (CEA)
https://www.cityenergyanalyst.com/
MIT License
194 stars 61 forks source link

GUI enhancement - Early'24 #3491

Open ShiZhongming opened 6 months ago

ShiZhongming commented 6 months ago

I am opening this issue compiling feedback from the user experience research studies conducted in 2023 concerning CEA Dashboard. In addition, I also link the relevant issues opened by our users at Github.

  1. Adjustable viewports on CEA Dashboard. Currently, the viewport of the maps and geometries is fixed in terms of dimension, it would be great to let the users adjust the dimension as per need for their monitor or screenshop purpose. Below is the original feedback from our student.
`Currently CEA's interface consists of only two parts: map on top and attribute table at bottom. Also, the height of the table is limited to show only 9 rows.

When having a lot of buildings (in our case, 355), the length of table is so long that the scroller on the right hand side is no longer useful anymore. Moreover, it's really hard to find one of 300+ buildings within this width.

Depending on possible difficulty of implementation, I could imagine the following use cases:

    the bottom edge of the table is able to be dragged, as one would adjust their size of software windows, to help show more rows;
    the layout of software can be adjusted to a horizontal one, where map sits on the left and table on the right, to better utilize the currently popular 16:9 screen ratio.
   A heavy user of CEA might need a second vertical screen, so if the table could become a pop-out window and show even more rows on the screen, that would be even more useful.

I understand the fact that CEA is still a software mainly for research use and processing of building data should set to be priority in its roadmap, but this would be beneficial to user experience in the future. Thanks for taking time reading my thoughts and looking forward to any progress from the CEA community!`
  1. Having the preview of scenarios under the project landing page as optional and set to false as default. This is important for projects with hundreds of scenarios. Previewing all scenarios will take up a large amound of computational power.
  2. Mass selection of buildings on the map just as for ArcGIS Map. This is important when manually preparing/changing the data for the CEA inputs for a larger scenario.
  3. Auto-updating the dropdown box for components under conversion.xlsx. For example, currently, there are 3 built-in types of PV panels. However, when users adding a PV4, it does not get auto-updated under the dropdown box on the CEA Dashboard's Database editor.
  4. Database editor does not work whenever a CEA plug-in is active. (Not sure this is a universal problem for all plug-ins).