florianm
commented
4 years ago Thanks, very good comments!
We've discussed the prepopulated landing page and came to the result that having some results shown is better than none. We can discuss the position of search bar. Eg. collapsible across the top, or on the left (as many web pages do). I've planned to change the card format to a more tabular look (issue to track this coming soon). Scrolling vs pagination is another UX discussion to have. Loading all results (we have e.g. 150k occurrences) is out of the question for performance reasons, so we have to paginate anyways. With denser, more row-like appearance, we'll fit more records onto one page (the older, more visually impaired users should decide on element sizing).
Remember that the data curation portal already has a tabular structure, and you'll use that more than the front-end for large searches. There are many cross-links between DBCA-facing GUI and data curation portal, and we'll add more (eg. show all occurrences of one population). I expect you'll have some ideas on column order in the data curation portal (trivially easy to adjust).
Problem
When querying data, rather than having the filters down the right hand side of the page, could it please be presented across one page (no scrolling required) without cards visible, which then would take us to another page with our search results presented in table format. Table format is useful for viewing and finding specific records when a large number of results is returned. It provides an overview of all records while at the same time lets us compare records easily. You can put scroll bars on tables in place of pages which would reduce the time spent searching for records. The most useful fields on the table that provide a good overview are: species, observation date, area code (pop/subpop number), conservation status, observer, QA level and unique identifier.
Feature
As an example, this is what the TPFL database query section looks like:
It is useful having the filter at the top of the table of query results below to remind you of what you have selected to view. Note the scroll bar and the 'details' button that takes you into the detailed version of an actual record - both very useful features.