britishlibrary / peripleo-lanc

https://www.bl.uk/projects/locating-a-national-collection
MIT License
13 stars 9 forks source link

UI - Mapping large amounts of points #3

Open portableant opened 2 years ago

portableant commented 2 years ago

As you well know, the initial view loaded in the interface is point data. However, when you plot thousands of points on a map, the user is faced with a mass of data points, which can be a little overwhelming.

For example:

Screenshot 2022-05-10 at 00 37 31

How can this be dealt with? Options - load high point volume datasets/layers as either heat map or clustered view? This may confuse the user further, though as it has to be made explicit when the change is made.

So you may want to ignore this question :)

Dan

rsimon commented 2 years ago

Hi Dan,

fully agreed on a good solution to the display of large datasets. One "hack", of course, is that you can force the UI into a specific initial state through the URL. E.g. while...

https://britishlibrary.github.io/peripleo-lanc/visitplus

... will open the map in points mode, this URL will open in heatmap mode:

https://britishlibrary.github.io/peripleo-lanc/visitplus/#/?/?/?/mode=heatmap

So, at least, there's a way for the host app to control initial state. But even despite of that, I think there's room for new ideas around better presentation in general.

portableant commented 2 years ago

The URL param is a good fudge fix for most people 😀