Scrolling doesn't maintain my view window

[cheddar]

So, today, I was trying to find a point in time where Howard's basal rate was the same before and after the midnight boundary. So, I loaded up blip, set my day view window to be just a bit before midnight (so I could see if there is a change right at midnight) and then started scrolling (scroll bar, because the arrows were too slow) through the data looking at the changes.

I was very quickly able to find a basal rate change that was the same before and after midnight. I was elated, the functionality I was checking ended up working out well, so yay!

Except, then I had this sinking suspicion, I looked up at the x-axis label and sure enough, the left-most point was no longer the time I had set, it was now 3pm!

I was told that Blip allowed me to control the viewport in order to let me define my own start and end of the day, but then when I scroll with the scrollbar it doesn't honor my day and confuses me greatly. As a developer using the system trying to spelunk through the data to figure out if functionality is working correctly, there's way too much cognitive overhead in making sure that I got the times correct.

Please, please, pretty-please give me a way to specify the start and end times of my one day view window and have those never, ever, ever change unless I choose to actively change them.

As I mentioned in the other ticket I created about how the user experience around time is less than intuitive (https://github.com/tidepool-org/tideline/issues/88), I believe other visualizations solve the problem of anchoring time but still providing the user with the ability to define their "own" day by just showing 2 days, midnight to midnight instead of 1. I would actually much prefer that to only looking at one day's worth of data...

[jebeck]

@cheddar Is your ideal interface just a paging interface? I think that's an interesting view, but @skrugman needs to be linked in, and I think we need to gather more feedback from other users.

I don't understand how we could have a scroll bar and not allow change in the view window, unless every time the user stops scrolling we shift the window back to their preferred range (3am to 3am or whatever), but I think that goes against how people expect scroll bars to behave...

[cheddar]

The scroll bar can only scroll through days, not time. Fwiw, I think people will expect the scroll bar to behave how they see it behave ;).

I've used scroll bars that lock to specific times before. It was relatively common that the first time I move it I don't move it enough and it doesn't actually change anything. I sit there and think, "huh..." Then, I move it more and it changes a whole unit of X, and I'm like, "ahhh, ok" and then I'm fine. So, there is a bit of a difference to normal expectations, yes, but as soon as the user actually tries it, they will quickly see what it is doing.

On the question of my ideal interface, it would be 2 days locked midnight-to-midnight, almost like two pages in a book.

[brandonarbiter]

@cheddar Thanks for the input. Would you include an example or two of an app that works the way you describe so we can play around with the UX?

[cheddar]

http://weatherspark.com/ is the one that immediately comes to mind.

[brandonarbiter]

@cheddar can you provide a direct link to precisely the UI to which you're referring?

Brandon Arbiter VP, Product + Biz Dev Tidepool http://www.tidepool.org | brandon@tidepool.org 917.536.0505 (m)

On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 11:49 AM, cheddar notifications@github.com wrote:

http://weatherspark.com/ is the one that immediately comes to mind.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/tidepool-org/hub/issues/71#issuecomment-42064954 .

[cheddar]

http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;q=Austin%2C%20TX%2C%20USA

It starts me out at 2 days, when I scroll, it generally keeps 2 days. Though, there are issues there too (the scroll is very sensitive and tends to go more than just one day at a time).

[jebeck]

It doesn't seem to keep the viewport for me.

For example, I start with 2 am May 2nd to 8 pm May 3rd: Scroll a bit, and now I have 2pm to 8 am: Is this not the interface you were referring to @cheddar? (i.e., am I doin' it wrong?)

[cheddar]

It is the interfact, you are right in that it does have some drift, but it's closer to what I'm looking at (I had to actually start playing around with it more in response to this to notice the drift, fwiw). In general, if you only scroll a little bit, the drift is negligible (at least for me)

[brandonarbiter]

Notes from my discussion with @Cheddar

@cheddar , the problem you are trying to address, as you pointed out, is analogous to "show me all the times I've gone low at 3pm." This is what we refer to as situational recall or pattern recognition. Such features are critical to our roadmap of providing decision support.

In the first release of Blip, our goal is to provide a view of all of a patients data in one place at one time, contextualized. Situational recall is not a problem we were trying to solve here. But I'm very excited to say... it's next!

Brandon Arbiter VP, Product + Biz Dev Tidepool http://www.tidepool.org | brandon@tidepool.org 917.536.0505 (m)

On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 12:21 PM, Jana Beck notifications@github.com wrote:

It doesn't seem to keep the viewport for me.

For example, I start with 2 am May 2nd to 8 pm May 3rd: [image: screenshot 2014-05-02 12 19 33]https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1588547/2866939/c27ff212-d22e-11e3-991d-baec54e6c994.png Scroll a bit, and now I have 2pm to 8 am: [image: screenshot 2014-05-02 12 20 26]https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1588547/2866951/e631553e-d22e-11e3-8dea-3b01be3cfabc.png Is this not the interface you were referring to @cheddarhttps://github.com/cheddar? (i.e., am I doin' it wrong?)

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/tidepool-org/hub/issues/71#issuecomment-42068322 .

[cheddar]

Okies, created https://github.com/tidepool-org/hub/issues/72 then.