[Strategic] Action: Test front page with moved search form

[Steve Coast]

Awesome Dermot, well done on the JFDI. Thoughts:

* get rid of the greeeeeeeeeen :-)
* remove the 'examples' text below the box. In the box put "Walderslade, 
England" in grey. That gets the point across. Then when they click the 
box, the text disappears
* remove the word "search"
* and, instead of "go" make the button say "search"
* move the 'where am I' to a crosshairs icon between the 
letf/right/up/down buttons and the zoom bar

Then, enjoy the pint I buy you for doing this :-)


On 5/26/2011 3:00 PM, Dermot McNally wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I have surmounted large amounts of personal skill gap in rails and git
> to produce a version of the front page with the search form moved to
> the top right. My first intention had been to try to find space among
> the login links, but based on a suggestion received I've instead
> allowed it to be a layer floating above the top right of the map
> itself. I think that this is far from perfect in a number of ways
> (details below), but it does get the form above the fold and into what
> we think may be the magic space for search forms, so it allows us to
> get some feel for it. It's my feeling that to accommodate this form in
> the same bar as the login links will require us to strip it back
> dramatically and probably change the treatment of the login links too
> - and that seemed to be too much speculative work, but again, some
> thoughts below on how we might develop this.
>
> My changes can be pulled from
> git://github.com/mackerski/openstreetmap-website.git and are, given my
> decision not to redesign the form, very tiny. A live (ish, map display
> is very slow and confined to Ireland) and functional version can be
> seen at:
> http://dev1.openstreetmap.ie/
>
> ...but maybe somebody has a spare instance running somewhere and can
> pull the changes into that.
>
> Anyway, my observations:
>
> * Subjectively, this location of the search form is not sufficiently
> high up to be Where You Expect. And I don't think we can improve that
> without encroaching on the login links.
>
> * This location obscures the layer picker. I'm not so sad about that,
> because I think the current picker is very unintuitive for newbies and
> that we should consider alternatives, but that's another day's work...
>
> * If we were to allow a search form to overlay the map in this way, it
> should ideally be smaller and have hide/restore options.
>
> * "Where am I?" probably doesn't belong beside the search form.
> Indeed, it should probably be called something along the lines of
> "Where is this?", since many users (I did) will expect it to move the
> map to their current location. I'm not sure where it should go, but
> have notions of a bottom-of-map single line of text with details of
> current location and a "refresh" button. The ideal would be for it to
> update on zoom or pan, but perhaps that's a bit too much Nominatim
> load for now.
>
> * The usage examples could be removed from permanent display and
> hidden behind a "?", "Usage" or "Examples" link or button, to appear
> as a popup or layer.
>
> * If we do decide that the examples and "Where am I?" link can be
> ditched, the search form could revert to a single line and we could
> try to accommodate it where the login links are now. I'd like to do
> more work on this but am unexpectedly travelling tomorrow, so I can't
> take it any further before tomorrow's meeting.
>
> * The current search behaviour puts results in a left-hand sidebar.
> The new location of the search field is very far away from this.
> Furthermore, I don't think a right-hand placement of the sidebar is a
> nice solution to this (though I haven't tried yet)
>
> Travel permitting I'll participate in tomorrow's meeting, but I'll
> review the minutes in any case. I do intend to continue to hack on
> this, so let's see what ideas arise.
>
> Cheers,
> Dermot
>