[Potlatch-dev] More UX testing

Steve Bennett stevagewp at gmail.com
Sat Mar 3 04:04:19 GMT 2012


My comments, repeated here:

> It’s still unclear how to start drawing lines and areas. In fact, most people accidentally start drawing lines, and press escape, without realising later on when they want to draw one that they already know how.

Solution, clear modes: “draw line”, “draw POI”, “moving stuff”, etc.
See the Google My Maps (or whatever they call it now) interface.

> People want to add icons to points of interest that are already drawn, but as an area. Maybe we should symbolize areas, or even better, prevent icons from being dropped onto existing areas with the same tags.

Just to double check: they know it’s already there as an area, they
just want to see an icon on top of it as well? What kinds of areas?
Ones without (rendered) names?

> People get mightily confused when the icons on the map don’t match the icons on the sidebar. Maybe we need to rethink how the sidebar icons appear.

Examples? It would be pretty easy to fix some of these.

> Creating other points of interest is hard to figure out (i.e. double-click).

Yeah. Maybe the default way to create a POI would be to single click
and get a pop up. Drawing a way would require you to switch to a “draw
way” mode as described above.

> If you have a large named area, it can be non-obvious (especially when zoomed in) what’s causing the name to appear.

Make the name clickable? Don’t render areas at all if they would be
greater than X% of the screen? (Not as silly as it sounds – if you’re
working on a picnic area, you don’t really want to see the entire
national park…)

> There’s useful shortcuts (like J) that don’t appear in the help.

An extra hideable toolbar showing keystrokes?

> There’s lots of useful actions that don’t have any GUI for them, unless you count documenting the keypresses on the 8th tab of the Help menu!

Yep, and they also give no feedback when you use them. (I think I
raised a Trac bug for this.) Maybe when you float over something,
after a few seconds, you get a prompt of possible actions?

> One person couldn’t figure out panning the map around while editing. That’s a combination of no buttons, and that if you (tentatively) click on the background, something happens (start drawing a way), so you learn not to click on the background. Of course, to pan the map you need to mousedown to drag it.

A “pan mode” (alongside draw way, create POI etc) would help. Looks like a hand.

> I’ve never seen anyone using the Potlatch 2 search button, but people often use the main search bar while editing. That often leads to pain when they click on the results.

What search button? Whoa…just spent ages searching through the GUI to
see what you might be talking about, found it after about 5 minutes.
Heh. Looks somewhat useful, but would be much better embedded in
different places for context (eg, searching for a a relation in the
“select relation” dialog).

Steve

On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 4:41 AM, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Another batch of user testing notes are available on my blog
>
> http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/archives/2012/03/01/make-the-hard-things-simple-and-the-simple-things-occasionally-surprisingly-hard/
>
> or http://bit.ly/wG4rzK for short. While all interesting, the third
> section focusses on Potlatch2, and might provide food for thought. I'm
> especially coming to the conclusion that defining the icons in
> map_features.xml is the wrong place to do it - the icons in the panel
> should always match the icons shown in the stylesheet. No idea how to
> fix that though :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
> _______________________________________________
> Potlatch-dev mailing list
> Potlatch-dev at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/potlatch-dev



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