[openstreetmap-website] Method to exit edit mode is unintuitive (#737)

James Harrison Fisher notifications at github.com
Mon May 5 10:43:39 UTC 2014


After posting [a bug report on the iD project](https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/2216), @tyrasd informed me that this would be a better place.

As you'll see, I was unable to find how to exit edit mode. I'm now aware that I can "click the logo", but I'm suggesting that that isn't a good solution.

By having an "Edit" button while in "View" mode, and the same "Edit" button bolded while in "Edit" mode, the current UI tells me that the "Edit" button is something like a toggle button: I can click it to toggle in and out of edit mode.

When I saw that this wasn't the case, I then looked for a "close"/"cross" button in a corner, based on the intuition that I had been "dropped into" edit mode, and so I was looking for a way to "escape" it.

When I saw that this also wasn't the case, I gave up. and examined the URLs in order to manually construct it.

Since this process was entirely driven by web conventions/intuitions I've built up over time, I expect that an average web user would follow a similar process and get slightly frustrated like I did.

Normally, "clicking the logo" takes you to the homepage of whatever site you're on. The behavior I expected in the context of OSM is that the logo would take me to `http://www.openstreetmap.org/`, not to `http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=A/B/C`. The intuition here is that the logo usually acts like a "reset" button.

IMO, an explicit "exit edit mode" button would be more intuitive.

I wonder whether anyone has done any [hallway testing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_testing#Hallway_testing) on this?

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/737
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