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gbif / portal16

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Multiple issues to do with occurrence display, map, and species #511

Open rdmpage opened 7 years ago

rdmpage commented 7 years ago

Inspired by user feedback https://github.com/gbif/portal-feedback/issues/382 ("find number of mammals in china") I tried to answer this question, and made a video of my experience.

Alt text

In summary

  1. It's not obvious how I get an answer to this question
  2. After realising that the list of species in the species tab will help me find the answer, I can't copy that data (download only applies to the occurrence data)
  3. When I play with the map I have to work really hard to click on the dots and not the squares.

I realise this is munging a bunch of issues together, but it bugs me when we gloss over the really basic stuff. I think it's entirely reasonable for someone to ask for a list of mammals in China, and GBIF doesn't do a great job of answering that question.

MortenHofft commented 7 years ago

Thank you so much for a detailed issue!

We added the species tab/ad hoc checklist as an experiment. Making it downloadable is postponed for now, but it should of course be an option if we keep the tab and it seems there is an interest in it. I have created an issue for it here

species tab Adding some info text to the 'species tab' in the top seems like a start to spare confusion at least. I'll do that and ask @dnoesgaard to write something informative as I'm not too good at that.

Do you have a better suggestion for the tab name? Or how we could make it more intuitive where to find that info?

map clicking For the map clicking I agree very much. We just talked about it 2 hours ago.

Ideally the map SOLR API exposed a coordinates to geometry. Currently we simply do coordinates +- some pixes and do a search. But there is no relation to neither dot nor square. So clicking could easily include info from two squares or miss occurrences in the other end of the square. And since the SOLR maps only have tiles for a few zoom levels, it becomes even more weird here than on the precalculated ones on dataset and species pages.

On some zoomlevels the target is too big, on others it is way too small.

Perhaps an option could be to draw the clicked query - then at least the user would know.

thomasstjerne commented 7 years ago

The map clicking part of this issue has been addressed here: #507 We have moved away from the click and now the user can draw a rectangle instead. The rectangle remains visible when the occurrences are show. Hopefully, this makes it more explicit which area has been searched.