Feedback on some usablity issues working publications, keywords and authors in the webclient
Here is a some user feedback from the case of trying to deal with publication metadata, that is journal articles or conference papers with their resp. authors (persons) and tags in using the DMX Webclient.
- Publication Rendering
- Navigation to Authors and Keywords from Publications
- Rendering directionality of assocs
- Support for clustering topics (bulk-operations)
- Improving the display of search results
Improving Publication Rendering
The following description boils down to the webclient needing to allow for more width options for items in-map, esp. when displaying paragraphs/texts, the rendering of Authors + Keywords should be much more compact rendering and potentially, one needs to think about limitting the height an item can have in a map.
The inefficient rendering of author names and keywords are responsible for the item taking too much space on the map. I will attach a screenshot of a simple publication with many authors to illustrate that. Some progress on dmx-platform/dmx-platform#95 would advance this issue by a mile. Persons and keywords would take much less space if they could be rendered in one-line, e.g. seperated by a commata. To illustrate their type, if one wants to do that at all, one headline for all of the items which follow should be enough then.
The rendering of an abstract (usually 250 - 300 words) is to narrow and leads to a fragmented (line-skipping) reading experience. It should be possible to switch an item to an alternative width of about 500-600px.
Both these issues can be seen in the following screenshot:
Here an example of a more effective rendering (though, without abstract) as the publication has 44 authors.
It maybe worth to consider how one could limit the maximal height of an item displayed in-map. Maybe allowing to scroll within the content-area of an item with a lot of height in-map, is an option.
I have had a similar experience with only rendering "Persons" as their detail rendering in-map takes quite a lot of space. The result being, I imported less data then I had for a person because their renderings in the map (overview) would take so much space that it nearly always took the whole height of the browser window (or even more).
Improving navigation to Authors and Keywords from Publications
- Revealing an author of a person DMX focusses the "Person" entry directly (revealing all authors is very cumbersome and only possible via a very small "Eye" icon)
- For revealing all keywords (Tag topics) of a publication is the same, it only works one-by-one and then the webclient always focusses the last selected keyword
The following screenshot tries to illustrate the issue:
Proposal: It would be helpful if the reveal command is similar to that in the "Related" tab (allowing to reveal without focus, either by default or as an alternate option). Once revealed, I can still focus on it if i want. The "eye" command to do so have a slightly bigger hit-area.
Note: This is due to "Tag" and "Person" are modelled into the topic type "Publication" as child types and thus they do not appear in the "Related" tab
Presenting the expressed directionality of associations in-map (e.g. Parent - Child)
Though I can express an hierarchical association in between two tags (using the "Parent" - "Child" roles) the assoc is rendered as if it does not represent a direction. If hierarchy is expressed, the assoc, maybe, could have a wider end at the parent topic and a narrower end at the child topic.
See #4 (comment 18109) for illustrative screenshots
Building up a vocabulary, clustering publication keywords
For building up clusters it would be much more efficient if one could select many topics and draw an association for all of them to one other topic/or assoc. This kind of "set operation" may be realized through a multi-select command and a subsequent dialog which allows the users to express details of all (to be created) assocs while the webclient then simply bulk creates these assocs after the dialog is confirmed.
All the assocs to be created should then be related via assocType X as with a specified role to the other topic.
E.g. "Digital Transformation", "Organizational transformation", "Lean transformation" is a more specialized category then "Transformation" (and thus would all become "Association" and as "Childs" while the other end becomes the "Parent").
See #4 (comment 18109) for illustrative screenshots
Search
When searching for items I am basically only interested in a list of "Publication", "Keywords (Tags)" and "Persons (Authors)" - they main entities I work with - but when I search these are mostly always at the very very bottom of a long search result list. Furthermore, where the search term matches the text in, e.g. an "Abstract" field, is not visualized, which makes checking the search hits, e.g. by their "Abstracts" very inefficient. It would go along way if there would be a possibility to only list results of type "entity" in the search result list.