[HOT] [Tasking Manager] enhancements - testers required

[David Schmitt]

On 2013-01-15 22:48, Pierre GIRAUD wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 9:59 PM, David Schmitt <david at black.co.at
> <mailto:david at black.co.at>> wrote:
>     On 2013-01-12 21:18, Pierre GIRAUD wrote:
>
>         The most important (new) things to notice are:
>            - tiles can be accessed in a read-only mode,
>            - with this in mind, tiles url (in the address bar) can be
>         used to be
>         shared to someone else. This might be useful to use a tile as
>         reference
>         in a discussion between mappers,
>
>
>     That was something quite confusing about the task manager: you had
>     to login to do *anything*. I see on the dev server, that it's still
>     a requirement to login to browse the tasks. Is this really
>     necessary? It would be nicer if a login would be *only* necessary
>     for "write" actions, like locking/commenting ?
>
>
> You're right. Accessing a tile in read-only mode shouldn't require a login.
> I'm not sure a user should be able to access a job without being logged in.

I'm not the one to decide for HOT, but as a user and for my own 
installation, I don't deem that necessary.

>            - you need to explicitly lock the tile before working on it,
>
>
>     So I can load and edit things without locking? To my engineering
>     mind, that sounds like a recipe for conflicts. I do not understand
>     the use case. Is there a workflow, where one needs to lock the task,
>     but not load it into an editor? That would be better served with
>     "lock", "lock and load".
>
>
> User may want to see it in an editor before they want to lock the tile
> to work on it. But I agree that conflicts may happen if users forget to
> lock the tile.
> On the first round I tried to display the "load in editor" buttons only
> after a lock, then decided to show them after selection. I can change it
> back easily if this sounds better.

Being a lazy person, I'm primarily concerned to have another mouse click 
in the workflow. Being a paranoid person, I'm concerned that forgetting 
(more likely ignoring) it will lead to conflicts and duplicated work.

Perhaps the solution would be to render all buttons in a lock-and-load 
variant, followed by a de-emphasized load-only button. Language-wise it 
should probably be "edit" and "preview", putting the edit button in 
normal color and the preview button in shades of grey to suggest which 
one the user should use.

>     With my UX head on, "lock" also sounds very technical and
>     forebidding. Perhaps "Work on this" might be more inviting. Also in
>     the history "Locked by ..." does not describe what's happening. "X
>     started to work" or "X reserved the tile," might be more to the point.
>
>
> Terminology is important. I agree.
> I'm happy to share ideas about UX. This is something I'm really
> sensitive to.
>
> In MapCraft they're using the following words: "take", "abandon",
> "reserved", "freed", "owner".
> I'm open to suggestions if others have any.
> Otherwise, I like the "Start to work on this", "X started to work on this".

The MapCraft terms sound ok to me too, although I'm not particularly 
enthusiastic about "abandon". On the other hand, it might make sense to 
use the same terms across tools, if(!) they really mean the same thing.

>     BTW, would it be possible to get a link/integration to one of those
>     whodidit services? Not everything that happens in a location is
>     going through the task manager.
>
>     https://www.google.com/search?__q=whodidit+openstreetmap
>     <https://www.google.com/search?q=whodidit+openstreetmap>
>
>
> Can you elaborate how you see this integration?

For simple information, a link to the other tool with a proper bounding 
box might suffice. For tight integration, it'd be cool to see a list of 
"recent" changesets for the choosen task, to see more context.

On the downside, this might lead to information overload.

Similarly, when using the TM for remapping or QA work, I often wished to 
get the exact tile I'm currently working shown in OSMI.

>            - comments are now required when marking a task as done or
>         (in)validating one,
>
>
>     What should users put there? Thinking back to the tiles I did, I can
>     only remember one or two tiles where I felt a comment was required.
>
>
> Maybe a comment is not really required when marking a task as done.
> In my opinion, it's required when invalidating though.

Agreed.


Thank you for your very important work on this. Mirroring Sam's 
statement, I believe the TM to be an important tool to allow OSM sub- 
projects to coordinate themselves.


Best Regards, David

>            - users have access to the tile change history.
>
>
>     Which surely helps making comments more useful. But required?
>
>
>         I'm not sure how important the locking is when an advanced user
>         wants to
>         (in)validate the work done on a job.
>         How about allowing validation without any lock. Or maybe we should
>         rethink the validation process.
>         Any thoughts?
>
>
>     I think locking is important when the workflow "expects" the user to
>     write to the tile.
>
>     Regarding the question of motivating people to re-take tiles for
>     validation, this too (like "lock") might be a problem of the used
>     word: "validation" sounds academic, important and of high
>     responsibility. As a arm-chair mapper with only very little
>     knowledge of the task's background, it is not my place to *validate*
>     edits. Perhaps call it "second-pass"? That could lower the barrier.
>     Also, I'm of the opinion that the data-user (in all of OSM) has to
>     do her own validation to see whether the data is up to the required
>     accuracy for the intended usage. Again this is not something someone
>     from the wider community can do. Third, real validation can be done
>     in batches, where much more than a single tile is pre-loaded into
>     josm, background tiles are downloaded in batches and then quickly
>     checked. This would not require locking or loading through the TM,
>     but only invalidating or accepting the checked tiles.
>
>
>     Best Regards, David
>
>
>
>
>
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> --
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>    | Pierre GIRAUD
> -------------------------------------------------------------