Forum (graphs/narratives) layout discussion

[jywarren]

Just want to create a place to discuss how the narratives/comments/graph page -- which I propose we start calling the "Forum" is shaping up. We've discussed possible changes to this that may be part of a future phase, but now that we're in implementation, just linking things back to the original design:

Just a design issue - can we have the graph bars be solid, as in the mockup? Thanks and looking great, Melissa!

[jywarren]

@mmmelissa - are you ready for lots of font/type/design tweaking suggestions yet, or still working on it?

Regarding "Forum" -- the name makes sense to me in that each of these pages will become a kind of forum about the issues displayed. So if y'all like "Forums" we could change the URL to 'wherewebreathe.org/forums/1' for each answer #.

[shapironick]

+1 on forum.

my only question is that if we know that we are going to want to change it in the future, would we conserve our resources more by just working towards the q,q,q,q,q-Forum-q,q,q,q-Forum model Jeff suggested (even if we can't fully get there) rather than building something that may be time-intensive to change? I have a million times less experience than y'all on this, so no need to explain how I'm seeing this wrong if I am, y 'all can simply say "that's not how this works" :)

On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 10:45 PM, Jeffrey Warren notifications@github.com wrote:

Forum

[mmnoo]

Regarding design suggestions. I can take them whenever, but I wont be starting on those kind of things until at least later next week (which will be a short week for me). It is easier/takes less time for me if you save design suggestions for when I am ready for them, so that I dont have to catalogue them somehow, but dont do that if it takes more effort to save them on your end. Whenever.

Regarding work flow, I wasnt planning on putting any more work into the forum until we had finalized a decision on direction about which ways it will interact with the site. Most of the effort so far on the Forum is prerequisite work that would have needed to be done either way (I needed to figure out how to format our data so that the charting tool we are using can consume it). The questionnaire logic needs some rethinking anyway so that it is driven by question sets instead of individual questions, so it would be ideal to know how the forum will behave before tackling the questionnaire as well.

[shapironick]

Thanks Melissa, that's really helpful.

Have a good holiday!

On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 5:57 PM, Melissa notifications@github.com wrote:

Regarding design suggestions. I can take them whenever, but I wont be starting on those kind of things until at least later next week (which will be a short week for me). It is easier/takes less time for me if you save design suggestions for when I am ready for them, so that I dont have to catalogue them somehow, but dont do that if it takes more effort to save them on your end. Whenever.

Regarding work flow, I wasnt planning on putting any more work into the forum until we had finalized a decision on direction about which ways it will interact with the site. Most of the effort so far on the Forum is prerequisite work that would have needed to be done either way (I needed to figure out how to format our data so that the carting tool we are using can consume it). The questionnaire logic needs some rethinking anyway so that it is driven by question sets instead of individual questions, so it would be ideal to know how the forum will behave before tackling the questionnaire as well.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/publiclab/wherewebreathe/issues/49#issuecomment-50968122 .

[jywarren]

Just consolidating/organizing issues -- closed #1 and moving the sketch here:

[mmnoo]

Regarding Jeffs suggestion of four graphs at a time (#60):

• Is it safe to assume that the 4 graphs are restricted to be related in topic, so that the commenting displayed with them isn’t scattered?
  • Which questions get lumped together?
  • Maybe alter that to be a maximum of 4 graphs? The symptom questions occur in sets of three (During the last three months, have you experienced headaches?, Do you believe your headaches are due to your home environment?, How much time do you have to spend outside of your home to alleviate your headaches?)
• If we show 4 graphs at a time, does it make sense to have a comment section for each graph? (see sketch below, might be squishy)
  • Imagine my sketch without the commenting for each graph, is it still busy and squishy? (I think so, but after drawing the sketch below, I like like not having comments for each graph)
• Some of the graphs (like for city, or housing unit model) will have many columns once we have a few participants, so maybe we can skip showing those? (See A and B in sketch - I have played with vertical x-axis labels, which are harder to get right than one would expect)
  • Is it acceptable in terms of data openness to not have to visualize every data category? It is ok to skip visualizing some questions, like city or state, because the data is downloadable? Location-related fields would be better visualized in a map anyway...
  • Maybe add an extra link to download the data in the forums?
• How do we deal with 4 graphs on mobile? (I have been spending a lot of time testing the site on my phone, so I am coming at this from a pretty mobile-centric focus right now)
  • Do we set a min-width and design the forum page for desktop primarily?
  • I have already tried to deal with legibility by giving the solitary graphs a min-width. On mobile this means that a user needs to pan and zoom to see the whole graph. I think the min-width thing works as-is, but with three extra graphs, I think they and the commenting section will get lost 'below the fold' and the user will only notice the first graph. I have attached what the forums page currently looks like on my phone at the bottom. I like to think that when a user loads that, they are enticed to scroll, but what would entice them to scroll to the commenting section or the other graphs?.

Current Forums page on mobile (on-load):

[jywarren]

OK super, great questions and I'll dig in here shortly. My first thought is to let people side-scroll through the graphs, showing a series of dots along the bottom for "where they are" and left/right carets. Perhaps also auto-advance it every 5 seconds, in case those indicators are not enough.

So the mobile layout would be different, but still organized by page in the same way.

[shapironick]

I agree with M about not having comments for each graph but each cluster of graphs, encouraging people to look across graphs and make connections as opposed to getting lost in the details of a single question.

Instead of skipping questions with many things in the x-axis (like to first two questions) maybe we can display them in numerical form (Out of 30 people that have answered this question 4 have the same X as you). We could also put in "x was the most common among those who answered". Or "your x was the 5th most common out of a total of y." If people thought it was a good idea, we could also have that for all questions and people could switch between the number view and the graph view so that users have more analytical capacity. Also perhaps that would be easier for coding?

In issue #8 I made a list of the questions in the long survey and noted what visualization (graph v number) would probably be most helpful to people.

I agree that a map would be helpful but perhaps we could have that in a separate section in the header. I think locations could work well as a number for the forums section. viz. "There are x other WWB members in your state"

I like Jeff's solution for the mobile lay out. Maybe auto advance only once so they get the idea and don't have to tussle with it if they want to stew over a single graph--or we could take the code from the intro tour and just put a welcome message for mobile users to the forum explaining where they can scroll.

Also we should think about having some less data-centered places to meet and share stories, because right now the data seems to be telling the story and people are just responding to that. Maybe a place at the end where they can write out their story in a way that is not fragmented into particular sections---maybe it would go before organize and mobilize if we decide a site structure like the following:

The full survey and the forum will likely both have the following sections:

House and Household
Individual Health Effects
Mitigation
Other indicators of poor IAQ (Mold visible, smell, perceptions of outdoor air)
Demographics and other risk factors
Formaldehyde Testing (linked to PL page where we will describe how to do DIY low-cost monitoring or buy cheap off the shelf kit)
Join the research team

And there would also be other sections of the forum that do not relate directly to the survey:

Organize and Mobilize 
Remediation (linked to PL page where we discuss how to do DIY low-cost phyto remediation or buy cheap off the shelf kits)

[shapironick]

Also how can we think about encouraging connectivity at the same time as user analysis (I assume that's what we want the comment section for)

Is there room so that later on we have a place where people could could compare across questions, like comparing in some modular way? I think that would be way more helpful to people than seeing every question individually. like "compare housing type to this symptom" and it reads out, "of the people who have lived in (the make and manufacturer of your home) 43% also have this symptom" and "of the people who have lived in this trailer that have attempted mitigation 8 % maintained this symptom"

[shapironick]

ooowee! the possibility of that last one is a really exciting prospect and adds a lot of participatory purchase--gives a much wider view of the data to users so they can see the way that multiple factors interrelate and people can explore those. We would need to underline that correlation is NOT causality and that more data is constantly rolling in so these numbers may change.

[jywarren]

OK, there's a lot here, but tell me what you think:

It'd be great to facilitate rapid back & forth flow from Forum to Questionnaire -- the two play off one another. One is data driven, one is narrative driven.

Top/Bottom layout: all graphs for a given topic shown 1 at a time, in a carousel, but the forum is the same below -- one Forum for each topic.

I do think we need some way to display every question type, or there's not a good motivation for people to answer them. We'll need to get creative for some, like Melissa points out, which have many many possible answers. Could we show the top 5 brands, or something? We can also help people find other folks with the same model, later, so maybe we don't need to show every model # etc. just yet.

The Forum section contains "Stories", i.e. "14 Stories", each of which begins with " writes: ..." Each Story has Comments.

Each topic ("Air Quality Indications" "Health Effects" "House & Household") has a long-form prompt at the end with a few questions or prompts encouraging people to tell their stories. "Tell how you first came to live in a manufactured home." and other more open-ended, narrative questions.

Idea: could the Forum be open all at once, but the graphs only if you've completed that set? Is it worth it to ask people not to "reveal" the results in the forum, or should we encourage people to do so, and keep the forums closed unless you've completed that part of the questionnaire? Maybe this idea is just a distraction as it may not be worthwhile.

[shapironick]

This sounds really really good! having all the graphs in a carousel would be great to reduce the clicks and so they can jog back and forth between graphs easily. Just to clarify: would it be graphs and then would the story entry be on the same page below the graphs (which might be nice so that they can refer to it while writing) or on another page? It might be really nice if, at least after entry, they were on the same page so it could be graphs carousel and then story carousel under it (and each story it says the number of comments) and a preview like in the "do you smoke?" image above?

Not so sure if we want people to not talk about results in the forum... as that might reinforce the lay-expert boundary (if the users can't discuss results). Something to think about though.

[mmnoo]

Carousel With the graph as the focus and each topic having its own page, it might be better to let the user drive the carousel rather than have it automatically advance? Generating graphs might be laggy on a slow connection or device, which a user might tolerate if they make a click themselves, but with the graph as the main focus of the page, and taking up likely 100% of the above the fold screen on mobile, incomplete loading also could be really frustrating and disorienting if every 5 seconds a user is confrunted with a loading indicator while the graph refreshes.

If graphs were demoted beneath the comments so that they arent the main focus, but rather comments and narratives are the primary page feature, auto advancing graphs might work better.

Busy Graphs I think it is possible to transform graphs with many categories into a graph with the top 5 (or whatever number) or potentially top 5 + other column.

(However, because we used a noSQL database, joining and summarizing data for the graphs is way more convoluted than it should be, so there is a risk that the detail of having an "other" column might be expensive.... I would be able to say more for certain when I dive back into coding. )

Other Ideas: (not sure about some of these, just throwing them out there)

• Prioritizing comments and seed questions above carousel containing graphs. This promotes the interactive/participation function of the page above the passive data browsing function.
• Integrating comments into questionnaire with extra text input as "additional comments:"
• In addition to prompting in other places, prompt user to participate in forum at end of questionnaire and end of each question set
• One long forum page with topic sections each including their respective graph carousels. See attached picture. Is scrolling down more intuitive than a separate page for each topic?
• maybe 'comments' and 'responses' instead of 'stories' and 'comments' -- I was confused by what was meant by stories. Jeff, you were intending just stories that are comments to specific topics, right? Or are they something more?
• text "hear their story>>" as "read more>>" instead?

[shapironick]

I agree on the possible frustrations of auto advance.

Having a long list that is accessible after finishing the questionnaire would be great.

Can we have a short design charette sometime next week? I think we will all be able to move forward more strongly and efficiently if we are all on the same page. I'll be on east coast time starting tomorrow so we will only be spanning PST to EST. Would that be okay?

[mmnoo]

I can do a charette next week.

[jywarren]

Agreed re: charette -- melissa, do you want to merge that with the mtg we're doing?

I agree with basically all of Melissa's points. Comments could be the last question in each question topic group. "Stories" > "comments" because it's about telling your story narrative more than commenting on the data.

Agree dropping auto-advance as long as we make it really clear how to see more than one graph.

[mmnoo]

Sure.

[shapironick]

I could meet Tuesday after noon EST, Wednesday or Friday.

[mmnoo]

My next week is pretty wide open, so whatever day works for you guys in between 1-6pm ET. (could probably do 12pm too if needed)

On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 10:10 AM, shapironick notifications@github.com wrote:

I could meet Tuesday after noon EST, Wednesday or Friday.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/publiclab/wherewebreathe/issues/49#issuecomment-56205985 .

Melissa Nunes Spatial IT & Web consultant Linkedin http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/melissa-nunes/74/639/3a5

[mmnoo]

Suppose the following:

A user skips all the questions in a question set. Should we still prompt for them to tell their story on that topic or should we check that they have answered x% of the question set's questions?

Should a user be able to tell their story without answering questions?

What grants them access to view other's stories and the data?

• they told their story
• they answered survey questions
• both
• either or

I am starting to think we should be err on the side of being permissive and flexible and then just track if a user has peeked at the forums.

[jywarren]

We talked about some options for this on Monday but I'd love to hear Nick's input.

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 6:02 PM, Melissa notifications@github.com wrote:

Suppose the following:

A user skips all the questions in a question set. Should we still prompt for them to tell their story on that topic or should we check that they have answered x% of the question set's questions?

Should a user be able to tell their story without answering questions?

What grants them access to view other's stories and the data?

• they told their story
• they answered survey questions
• both
• either or

I am starting to think we should be err on the side of being permissive and flexible and then just track if a user has peeked at the forums.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/publiclab/wherewebreathe/issues/49#issuecomment-56597103 .

[shapironick]

Under our current set up, my opinion would be that people should be able to tell their stories without necessarily answering all (or any) questions but I would also say that we shouldn't advertise that. So allow people to be able to skip skip skip to the forum without overtly stating that they can do it (kinda like the NYT pay wall workaround). But still remind them at the end of a section if they haven't answered all the questions--some may want to go back and fill them all in.

But when when we develop the lending library I would think that skip skip skipping would disqualify them from us sending them a free sensor. A give and take in that regard seems fair to me. They would still be able to build their own based on the PL instructable or buy one from the PL store.

I do however think that a slight paradigm shift would make it easier for people who didn't want to answer the questions and resolve make the consent/privacy and data quality issues we have. I wrote about this in the long email i sent to J, S, and N in august.... and only got a response from Nicole even after a follow up email. I was hoping to discuss the issues in the charrette i proposed but it looks like that already happened? I've posted that email in a new issue #78. Not trying to be dogmatic here or force my ideas, just think that we need to proceed with an overall plan that gets lost when we just work from issue to issue.

[mmnoo]

Like the idea of a free sensor! Cool!

Are we still trying to have that charette this week? I can still do tomorrow or Friday between 1-6pm ET.

Is everybody getting notifications from GitHub consistently? I wonder sometimes about how much I can depend on being notified by email of new messages so I compensate by checking GitHub itself whenever I am on it. I feel like some messages still fall through the cracks though. Anyone else feel that way?

[shapironick]

Ah, sorry I jumped the gun. It sounded like the charette had already happened. Yes, I'm still free tomorrow and Friday.

Yeah, the git hub notifications are a bit tricky. I just subscribe to them all in order to keep them straight.

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Melissa notifications@github.com wrote:

Like the idea of a free sensor! Cool!

Are we still trying to have that charette this week? I can still do tomorrow or Friday between 1-6pm ET.

Is everybody getting notifications from GitHub consistently? I wonder sometimes about how much I can depend on being notified by email of new messages so I compensate by checking GitHub itself whenever I am on it. I feel like some messages still fall through the cracks though. Anyone else feel that way?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/publiclab/wherewebreathe/issues/49#issuecomment-56603749 .

[mmnoo]

Ok, update:

I have gotten a prototype qqqq, story prompt, qqqqqq, story prompt feature working.

Story prompts will be triggered after the zip code and sense of smell questions.

I have deleted the user accounts again, so you will need to re-register

http://dev.wherewebreathe.org:3000

If you want to see the prompts but dont want have to go through the questionnaire: http://dev.wherewebreathe.org:3000/stories/Household http://dev.wherewebreathe.org:3000/stories/Symptoms

There are still 15 hours remaining from the last contract. I will use them to continue onto prototype the narratives page integrated with stories unless you guys think I should hold off and wait for the charette to happen.

[jywarren]

Hi, Melissa - do you think you could take a crack at the dashboard?

Nick - i'm responding to your big picture email now. Sorry for the delay, it's because of the kickstarter!!!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/publiclab/the-homebrew-oil-testing-kit

finally launched yesterday.

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Melissa notifications@github.com wrote:

Ok, update:

I have gotten a prototype qqqq, story prompt, qqqqqq, story prompt feature working.

Story prompts will be triggered after the zip code and sense of smell questions.

I have deleted the user accounts again, so you will need to re-register

http://dev.wherewebreathe.org:3000

If you want to see the prompts but dont want have to go through the questionnaire: http://dev.wherewebreathe.org:3000/stories/Household http://dev.wherewebreathe.org:3000/stories/Symptoms

There are still 15 hours remaining from the last contract. I will use them to continue onto prototype the narratives page integrated with stories unless you guys think I should hold off and wait for the charette to happen.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/publiclab/wherewebreathe/issues/49#issuecomment-56866556 .

[mmnoo]

Will work on dashboard.

Awesome video!

[shapironick]

Best kickstarter video yet!! Sorry to be such a nudge. :)

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 6:31 PM, Melissa notifications@github.com wrote:

Will work on dashboard.

Awesome video!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/publiclab/wherewebreathe/issues/49#issuecomment-56893931 .