 |
 |
On Wed, 16 Mar 2011, Hiten Vaghmaria wrote: > We would also welcome any comments you may have on the changes we're > proposing. You can see a development version of our next release here: > http://dev1.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/ I hope this new release addresses usability issues with the individual pages listing a resource. It seems that an enormous amount of vertical space and text is used to convey relatively little information. I can't get the licence to appear in the first screenful, for example. The pages seem to have been designed primarily to be machine-readable. Human users would benefit from some changes, and I think suggestions have been made in previous user consultations. 1. Show full item record: probably the least important link on the page, but given top billing. Why not remove this one and leave the duplicate at the foot of the page? 2. Share: Are Delicious and Twitter so important that users need two links to share the current page through them? 3. Click on the title (the instinctive thing to do) and nothing happens. 4. Keywords: When the keyword is a phrase sometimes it contains a space, sometimes an underscore, e.g. adaptive_radiation . It just takes one line of code to make this consistent. 5. Per Pat Lockley's comments, do users really want to read through all the keywords associated with an item before finding a download or preview link for the item itself? 6. Date: It would only take a couple of lines of code to generate a more human-readable date. 7. I and others have in the past raised the question of what "date" in this context means (i.e. date of what?) Has there been any decision taken as a result of this? 8. Package Download / Package Preview : the most important links on the page, presented as images which, due to habits learned on other sites, one tends to ignore because images of that size are usually adverts. 9. Why "package download" and not just "download"? Oh, I get it: "package download" must apply when the resource is a content package and "download" when it's just a simple file. But hang on, I still get "package download" for a single image. I try to download a 100kB image; I'm told "As some resources are quite large in size it can take some time to prepare them for download." Seems like this site doesn't want me to have this file. 10. "Licence note:" what work does "note" do here? 11-12. The licence note is the most baffling aspect of the whole thing. In the resources I'm looking at there are two sections of the page dealing with the licence, and you follow an internal link from an uninformative one to the one that gives you the information you want. Not hard to see how to make a usabilty improvement here. 13. "This resource has been shared under a specific licence." as opposed to what other kind of licence? 14. "Files in this item: Show file list" Too many words. Why not just "File list" with an icon? 15. What's the sense of a "file list" when there's only one file, e.g. an image or a readme? 16. "Terms of service Terms of service": too many words. 17. "This item appears in the following Subject(s)": what work is done by the first six words? 18. "Show full item record" : "Show" as opposed to what? 19. Side navigation: what work is done by the unlinked word "Browse"? Moving away from the individual record pages: 20. There are resources called "test", "test object" and "test link". They aren't just there because it's a development server: they're in the live database as well. 21. Search results show the same interest in spreading things across a lot of vertical space: the "Go" button given its own line, for example. I thought it might just be Firefox formatting, but other browsers have this as well. 22. "Your query "((psychology))" produced 287 result(s)." and "Search results" on two separate lines. Why is the second one necessary? 23. In search results: "Now showing items 1-10 of 1137": What work is done by "Now showing"? 24. In the psychology query I tried, the first page had four identical results ( http://dev1.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/2563 http://dev1.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/2569 http://dev1.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/2572 http://dev1.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/2577 ) It only takes a couple of lines of code to detect these duplicates. 25. Please "login": on my screen, "login" in blue is hard to make out against cyan background. -- Dr Martin L Poulter ICT Manager, The Economics Network Based at the ILRT, University of Bristol: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ The full experience: http://infobomb.org/ Wikipedia contributor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MartinPoulter Bias research: http://biasandbelief.wordpress.com/ Comedy music: http://www.myspace.com/glandscape Community blog: http://doodznchyx.wordpress.com/