[ckan-discuss] CKAN UI improvements #1 - Package Page

Wed Dec 1 13:45:07 GMT 2010

Based on the feedback I've done a second pass at the package page:

http://ckan.org/wiki/UIRedesignPackage

There are two new mockups there, the second one includes some optional
UI - a welcome message for users landing from google and a banner
showing that information is missing.

It's probably easiest to look over the mockups, but a couple fo
specific things of note:

Comments/discussion - I've changed the name to 'Questions and
comments' and added the number of items to the button. I actually
think this makes it more prominent than having them further down the
page, and hopefully tells the users at first glance that they can
interact with this page.

Downloads / resources - I've gone with 'Downloads and resources' as
the title, so as to accomodate  RDF etc, and added an explanation
under the table.

API / datapkg - I've added a visually obviously separate section for
code related stuff and included some examples for using datapkg.

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 6:49 PM, Richard Cyganiak <richard at cyganiak.de> wrote:
> Hi Richard,
>
> Great to see work on the UI of CKAN happening!
>
> On 30 Nov 2010, at 13:44, Richard Pope wrote:
>>
>> First up here are a few suggestions and a mockup for the package page:
>>
>> http://ckan.org/wiki/UIRedesignPackage
>
> Nice!
>
> Some comments:
>
>> Comments - Suggest move to a separate tab and rename discussion as per
>> Wikipedia.
>
> Not sure about this. On Wikipedia, the discussion page is not for
> discussions about the topic of the article but about discussing the article
> itself. On CKAN, my impression is that comments about either of those are
> encouraged. Or not? And if the comments can contain useful information about
> the dataset (“it's full of errors and not actively maintained, don't waste
> your time with this”), then they shouldn't be hidden on a separate page.
>
> So I guess some clarity about the purpose of the comments field is needed
> first.
>
>> Getting the data - 'resources' is unclear term, just call it 'downloads?'
>
> That would be a step in the wrong direction IMO. It's not just downloads but
> all sort of other things too -- API endpoints, documentation, example links.
> See [1] for a proposal that deals with this in a better way IMO -- by moving
> the description to the first column, it becomes much clearer what the
> resource is (download or something else).
>
>> Groups - Confusing having groups and tags on this page, suggest remove
>> groups for now focus on tags as primary method for organising / grouping.
>
> Please don't do that. Groups don't have to be visually prominent, but you
> would make my job as the manager of a CKAN group MUCH harder by removing
> this information completely from the package page. I agree that tags are
> certainly much more important for the average user, and should be displayed
> more prominently.
>
>> Title - Name of package gets lot in the buttons (edit etc) and the package
>> slug id
>
> The package ID shouldn't be as prominent as it currently is, but should
> still be shown somewhere to enable tools like datapkg where one needs to
> know the package ID.
>
>> API / package slug - Create new API section the explains the slug id and
>> how to access via datapkg etc
>
> Yes good idea. Don't call it “package slug” though!
>
> Please keep the package URL (homepage) more prominent. I'd vote for keeping
> it where it is now, under the big title. I often use CKAN as a sort of
> directory for going to the web pages of certain packages.
>
> +1 to the other points.
>
> Some other points that I would like to see addressed in a redesign of the
> package page UI:
> http://ckan.org/ticket/818
> http://ckan.org/ticket/816
> http://ckan.org/ticket/814
>
> Again, thanks for working on this! I'm very much looking forward to seeing
> some of these improvements go live on the site soon.
>
> Best,
> Richard
>
> [1] http://ckan.org/ticket/817

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