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

Tue Nov 30 16:39:51 GMT 2010

David,

Thanks for the useful feedback. Since a lot of it relates to language
in one way or another I've made this page on the wiki:

http://ckan.org/wiki/UILanguage

I'll do a second pass at the mockup taking into account your comments
once a few more people have added theirs.

cheers,

Richard

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 4:16 PM, David Read <david.read at okfn.org> wrote:
> Richard,
>
> Lots of good ideas here. CKAN has attracted a lot of discussion of the
> UI, been through multiple major changes to it, sometimes discussed,
> sometimes just done unilaterally. I think that every time we get new
> ideas we must take into account previous experimentation, but also
> shouldn't be afraid to try new stuff, to avoid the "but we tried WAP
> in 1998 and found that no-one wants mobile internet" syndrome.
>
>> Ratings is rating really much use? It's hard to know what is being rated - quality, openness, interestingness, format. Suggest removing and focus on comments / discussion.
>
> The intention was to crowd-source some sort of vague quality or
> interestingness. You can see from the stats page though that these in
> general aren't used or useful. So I'd agree on removing them from the
> template and ratings in the code too. Maybe a Facebook 'like' button
> serves us better here? (Or maybe lots of our users hate find FB rather
> closed!)
>
>> Comments - Suggest move to a separate tab and rename discussion as per Wikipedia.
>
> The discussion page on Wikipedia is to discuss changing the page, so
> less important than the content of the page and only of interest to
> editors. Most of our comments are questions (that are often being
> answered) and very useful extra metadata snippets. It's turning into a
> great place for extra unstructured data alongside the structured
> record. You could argue it should all go in the 'notes' field, but I
> think comments serves it well. So I don't agree it's the same as
> Wikipedia's discussion or that it should be hidden in a tab.
>
>> Comments - Add hint to new page suggesting what sort of comments/questions people should make
>
> Yes, clarification is always good. Our site needs explaining to new users.
>
>> Getting the data - Can we make the download (Resources) section clearer or more prominant? This seems to be the primary purpose of this page for a casual user.
>
> Sounds good.
>
>> Getting the data - 'resources' is unclear term, just call it 'downloads?'
>
> 'Downloads' rather excludes SPARQL endpoints and APIs (e.g. nice
> scraperwiki api ;-) ) I don't know why the URI link text was changed
> to 'Download'.
>
>> Groups - Confusing having groups and tags on this page, suggest remove groups for now focus on tags as primary method for organising / grouping.
>
> Groups are used heavily by lots of users right now, so this needs
> careful consideration. I understand Friedrich has renamed groups
> 'departments' in the IATI branch and that is due to go into CKAN head
> soon, so I assume lod etc. will be transitioned to something else.
> Friedrich / Rufus what is the plan?
>
>> Tags - Should be able to add a tag directly via ajax (as per flickr)
>
> Cool! And it would be good to suggest tags too (e.g. if there is the
> word 'music' in the title/notes then it suggests that tag)
>
>> Title - Name of package gets lot in the buttons (edit etc) and the package slug id
>
> Yes
>
>> Buttons - move to top right
>
> Sure
>
>> API / package slug - Create new API section the explains the slug id and how to access via datapkg etc
>
> The docs for the API and various clients including datapkg are all
> available, but I think it would be good to have some pop-up help in
> CKAN. like there is on scraperwiki to get people started.
>
>> Completeness - If a package is missing a description / licence / download then display a prominent message in the header asking passing users to add the missing info
>
> Sounds good.
>
> I do especially like your drawing of the CKAN home page. There are a
> few things we'll have to work on underneath to get all the info for
> the template, but let's do it.
>
> In your mock-up CKAN package view:
>
> * I'm not sure about using the word 'metadata' as the title for the
> bulk of the data record. There must be a more understandable word...
>
> * When you say "this data is also available in JSON and RDF" this
> could mislead, because this could be confused with the resource data,
> when we mean the record/metadata/data. I think the JSON/RDF icons
> could be better, but do you really think it'd be better without icons
> and put this in the main flow of the record rather than a side-box?
>
> * I really like getting rid of the first side-box, which repeats the
> author, maintainer and licence details.
>
> David
>
> On 30 November 2010 13:44, Richard Pope <richard at memespring.co.uk> wrote:
>> Hello,
>> I've been looking at some potential changes to the CKAN UI. Rather than
>> embark on a mega-redesign I thought it would be best to take a section at a
>> time and see what small improvement could be made to try and make CKAN 1)
>> more easy to understand by a casual user 2) simpler and more intuitive to
>> navigate.
>> First up here are a few suggestions and a mockup for the package page:
>> http://ckan.org/wiki/UIRedesignPackage
>> Thoughts?
>> Richard
>> PS. In addition, here's a couple of sketch-notes I did which might be of
>> interest (assuming you can read my awful handwriting):
>> http://ckan.org/attachment/wiki/UIRedesign2010/ckanshare.jpg
>> http://ckan.org/attachment/wiki/UIRedesign2010/pages.jpg
>>
>> --
>> /*
>> richard at memespring.co.uk
>> memespring.co.uk
>> ++44 7976730458
>> memespring (flickr/skype/etc)
>> memspr (aim)
>> */
>>
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>>
>>
>

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