Enhance user experience: case of 1000s unseen obs

[damianooldoni]

Based on conversation with @timadriaens.

The user gets sometimes notifications about hundreds or thousands of new observations. This can be overwhelming. Most of the time this is linked to the publication of an entire dataset with historical data. It will happen in the feature again, so we should take care of it. And the updates at monthly level of some datasets means that hundreds of new observations will appear sometimes as well.

The user is typically not interested to new but historical observations, it's an early warning tool after all 😄 So, the user should get the most recent observations first. This can be solved by ordering the observations in Table View by date (most recent first) by default. Date is crucial in an early warning tool, @timadriaens and I think. Notice the link with #130 .

@timadriaens proposed to allow users to set up a temporal window while creating an alert, e.g. "notify me for new observations with observationDate equal to two months ago or less". However, this is against the seen/unseen observations logic. Also, the users can enable data range filtering to focus on the new observations, for example. The "Mark all as seen" button will do the rest. @nicone, @peterdesmet: what do you think about it?

[niconoe]

Yep, I understand the issue.

I suggest to first implement the first suggestion (default table by - reversed? - date).

We can then reevaluate if further changes are needed. At first look, I don't think adding some temporal filters to the alert would fundamentally break the core seen/unseen logic: we still keep track of a lit of seen and unseen observations per user, those users still get an alert for unseen observation that match the alert, ... The only change would be one more criteria (the observation date is recent) to the alert observation selection logic.

[peterdesmet]

Ordering the observations in Table View by date

Yes, this seems like a fix that can be implemented quite easily. Let's keep the idea of time filtering for alerts as an idea for now.

[damianooldoni]

I definitely agree with you, @peterdesmet. The idea of time filtering for alerts is just an idea at the moment.

[niconoe]

The observations table are now by default sorted by date (most recent first) - the ordering can still be changed by clicking other column headers.

@timadriaens: can you have a look and tell me if this quick and dirty solution solves most of your concerns? Adding temporal range to an alert is definitely doable, but later and after prioritisation of the many enhancements we've already imagined!

[niconoe]

@timadriaens: this workaround is now in place since 6 weeks. Do you think it solves the issue in an satisfying manner?

[timadriaens]

it does, thanks