harcod
commented
3 years ago jhawk's suggestion from Slack:
When there were a lot of appointments earlier I set the filter down to 5 miles, and periodically reloaded the page. I failed to notice that the filter was still in place when the number of appointments dwindled down to zero, and continued to refresh the page thinking there were no appointments at all, not no proximate ones. This suggests to me that if the filter is so narrow as to exclude everything yet there is actual availability, the UI should do something. Show a message other than "None of the vaccine sites that we monitor currently have available appointments" (Which is untrue!). And not the same color/appearance as the Blue.
Alternatively, filter restrictions could time out. I don't love that architecturally, but it would have been what I wanted in my case.
Also, what if we integrated distance into the UI? Instead of a strict filter, what if we showed a visible break at the selected distance (big horizontal line separating cards) and then used a visual indication that the remaining appointments were excluded by the filter. E.g. if you set it to 5 miles, then you see the <5 mile appointments, a big horizontal bar, and then the remaining appointments are visible beneath the bar in gray. This would avoid the situation I described where a user sets an exclusionary filter and then the data changes and they'd want a broader filter if only they knew.
If the user selects a search radius other than Any, then we currently show the "No Appointments Found" (blue) message.
We should alert the user that appointments may be available at other locations outside of their current filter settings.