Categories POC

[wbazant]

For #383

Things I like about this implementation:

• lets you discover the 'Freegan' types, and maybe the 'Honeybee' types are a bit interesting
• works with some logic ( toggling a category includes it on both map and types menu)
• lets us assess the quality of annotation and maybe improve it
• works with the default choice of 'Forager + Freegan on first render'

I don't like the tags UI, or any other UI I tried, including a multi-select and a list of checkboxes.

Let's not merge this branch - e.g. the On The Map checkbox is not working now - but maybe it will be useful for figuring out what a better solution will look like.

[ezwelty]

@wbazant Well, don't be so hard on yourself 😉; this is pretty exciting. Took it for a spin and here were my initial ideas:

• Do not call /locations when category filter changes (only when type selection changes)
• Use lowercase
• Begin category list with an all with one of the following behaviors:
  • If clicked, selects itself and deselects all others. If clicked again, deselects itself and selects all others. If other tag is clicked when it is selected, it is deselected (see https://hutmap.com/map shelter type filter).
  • If clicked, selects itself and all others. If clicked again, deselects itself and all others. If any other is deselected, it is also deselected.
• Rename no category to other
• Rename Type input to Search by name
• Make the category tags more compact
• Group together the category tags, Search by name, and On the map as search controls distinct from the Select all / Deselect all selection controls.

I fiddled around, including reducing On the map to an icon to the right of Search by name: https://jsfiddle.net/5ajpzfsw/5

What do you think?

[wbazant]

All right, I was being hard on the feature actually ;). Thanks for the suggestions, making tags square helps with the UI and the 'All' tag is a logical extension.

Still, I would like to see what this implementation does well, and then explore a step back. The requirements we have for this feature come from experience with the current site so I have no reason to dismiss them, but combined they put a lot of constraints on the solution. Meanwhile, if we looked at the current beta site from scratch and wanted to improve search controls we wouldn't come up with these categories, the data behind them, the default state offered to a new user, etc.

Do not call /locations when category filter changes (only when type selection changes)

You can see this version at 5deeed2 - it was as good as the head commit for the exploring the types menu, but it seemed weird that I have to do 'Select all' to enact the choice. It also came with the default state of only some checkboxes being checked, which looked weird on unchecking the default categories and navigating to Grafter or Honeybee. So then I did the head commit version where all type checkboxes are selected by default, but the selection for the map combines categories + types.

What's good and working well? One piece of feedback I got indirectly is, now it's easy to exclude dumpsters, but what else?

Meanwhile I think these design decisions are maybe not working out that well:

default is forager + freegan

When unticking these and ticking "other", and also unticking "include tree inventories", that's the stuff we exclude from the map. I can see some imperfect annotations but not sure if the map is so much better with them excluded that it's worthwhile to justify the complications of not everything being the default.

allow browsing multiple categories at once

When I was learning about what types each category has I did a bit of "check this, uncheck that" to see what's in e.g. just Grafter, but I never wanted to see more than one category at a time.

the site has data in these four kinds of categories

Why are exclusive Freegans (only interested in dumpsters) different from e.g. my pals in Glasgow that press urban apples from juice, and will only be interested in apple trees? Still not sure who a Honeybee user is and how they use the site, do they have urban hives they need to locate? Will a budding urban grafter benefit from the Grafter category? With the current annotation state, it seems to mostly be a way of finding types annotated to a genus level (e.g. apple trees that are annotated as Malus).

I'm thinking maybe the non-default categories would be really good as side avenues to explore if they're presented as a subset of filters together with a title / description, a bit like 'Invasive species in CO', and the default selection could just be all types again or maybe there could be one checkbox that excludes more or what we want to exclude.