Copy of the mass-email
Several bugs were caught by users and fixed. These were fairly easy to find and fix.
The more valuable info to take from these responses are how people use the site
and what might be hard to interpret from the map and other data products.
Notes from responses
- Users didn't use the search bar to find organisms often. They never used search before the dropdown.
- There was no one distinct thing that people looked for first when browsing to the site.
Here are some things they were looking for:
| Info Looked For |
|---|
| Abundance/Time | 11 |
|---|
| Abundance/Space | 11 |
|---|
| Organism Data | 11111 |
|---|
| Site Info/Coverage | 1111 |
|---|
| Species Lists | 1 |
|---|
- 5/8 respondents wanted to get back to the help popup. I modified the page so that the help
link now reloads the popup. When it is closed, the window now goes through a "minimizing"
animation and when closed the link back to it is given a fading highlight.
- 3/8 respondents thought the meaning of the data markers was not immediately clear. I have
thought about moving to color coded dots instead of these markers, and it may be worth
experimenting with.
On of the problems with color coding is that you lose a significant amount of detail since
the eye cannot perceive changes as clearly as with bars. Given the lack of exact precision in
ecological data however, this might be acceptable.
-
It was unclear for many, if not all the respondents to display just the site markers
without any data. This definitely needs to be fixed.
-
A few people responded that the organization of the taxon dropdown was unclear, and that sorting
by protocol wasn't useful. Given the difficulties in grouping organisms by fish/algae etc, and
the need to tell people why the protocol type is important, changes could be made to this control.
A separate protocol dropdown that controls what is available in the taxon dropdown would force
people to pay attention to this aspect of our surveys, and bring attention to links that describe them.
| Browser Statistics |
|---|
| Mozilla/Firefox | 1111 |
|---|
| Internet Explorer | 1111 |
|---|
| Safari | 11 |
|---|
| Opera 8.5 | 1 |
|---|
Features people would like to see
- Kelp abundance graphics for any year from the site description page
- Have site names popup whenever the mouse hovers over a marker (difficult with current setup)
- Some way to view more than one taxa at a time on the map
- Species list for each site, all years (good suggestion, big oversight!)
- Expansion of the kelp infographics into a seperate page with layers one can toggle to display different
organisms. If the taxa is too small, have a zoomed-in inset.
- Make all species lists visible at once