Home

Welcome to the islandora-UX-useathon wiki!

--

Project Goals

This project had two main goals for participants:

1. Produce an actionable list of UX changes and/or considerations for the Islandora Starter Site.
2. Grow our team's familiarity with the Starter Site, working in Drupal, and to give Islandora beginners the opportunity to explore why things are the way they are.

--

List of UX Changes

In the course of the IslandoraCon 2023 Use-a-thon, we identified a number of possible UI and UX updates that we think are worth any of the following:

1. Implementing on the Starter Site and making the fix available to any users that would like to implement them in their own uses of Islandora.
2. Prompting discussion as to whether a change should or shouldn't be implemented, with the hope that if there is a strong reason for something to stay the way it is currently, that the reasoning is public and well-understood by all.

To that end, we conducted an informal UX assessment of the Islandora Starter Site using our own local instances, as well as sandbox.isladora.ca, identified UX changes that we considered to fall into one of the following categories based on scope and related user activity:

• Content Management
• Content Presentation
• Discoverability
• User Flow
• Scalability
• Sandbox Improvements

An issue was created in this GitHub for each proposed change and assigned the categories to these issues as labels. Once suggestions were assigned to a particular category, proposed solutions to each were explored.

Our team are not developers, so we have limited capabilities to enact some of the practical changes we suggest.

Below, we have included a list of the proposed changes, their category, any completed work/explored to that end, and next steps/actions. This information has also been included as part of each of their associated GitHub issue.

--

PRELIMINARY SOLUTION EXPLORED

• [Content Presentation]: Change label from "Member of" to something more appropriate to inanimate objects such as "Part of"
• [Content Presentation]: 'Member Of' could be removed from the right-hand advanced search menu for Collection Views.
• [Content Presentation]: Change label from "Linked Agent" to something more human friendly like "Contributions" or "Contributors"
• [Sandbox improvements]: Add a placeholder Nav to the Hamburger Menu so its default styling can be showcased. NOTE: The issue that flagged this may actually be something separate.
• [User flow]: return user to associated object rather than to main media management view after ingesting media on an object
• [Scalability]: provide "Manage Content" filter block on collections children view
• [Sandbox improvements]: Include a page featuring Islandora 2 showcase example sites for new users to explore

MORE EXTENSIVE WORK/EXPLORATION REQUIRED

• [Sandbox improvements]: 'Code of conduct' page link on the Home Page leads to a broken link on Islandora site
• [Content Presentation]: Fedora URI should be bolded alongside all of the other metadata fields for an object.
• [Discoverability]: Add "contains" as dropdown option in "Search within Collection" block
• [User Flow]: return user to previous page after user authenticates rather than taking them to their user profile page
• [Manage Content]: bring orphan fields into line with the 'heading' or 'dropdown' style of the Repository Item Edit View (ie: Viewer Override)
• [Manage Content]: Help text should sit above the field but below the title > more natural flow from title to explanation to entering your metadata.
• [Language switcher]: add language switcher in the starter site for multilingual purposes (eg: https://sandbox.islandora.ca/node/24)

PENDING CHANGES/EXPLORATIONS

• [Content Management]: Media Type - Explore how selecting Extracted text might work for a file that is not extracted text when you upload it. Tried this in a couple of different ways this morning.