Use static height for Community Taxon section on Observation Detail page

Feature Requests
1

This is a report of a user interface bug. The problem manifests itself while executing a particular workflow via the web UI for identifying observations.

On any observations page, perform the following actions:

  1. Suggest an identification
  2. Make an annotation

Under the right conditions, step 1 interferes with step 2. Three sections of the observation page are involved: Activity, Community Taxon, and Annotations. The basic problem is that the content of the Community Taxon section is dynamic.

Suppose the observation has a single identification before the workflow is executed. If step 2 is performed immediately after step 1, the process will be disrupted since step 1 causes the content of the Community Taxon section to change, which pushes the UI for annotations further down the page. If a select menu was activated prior to the rendering of the dynamic content, the interface will be “broken,” that is, the select menu will be displaced. Additional user actions will be required to complete the annotation process.

This bug is unfortunate since it discourages annotations. The interface should be redesigned to encourage annotations at the time of identification.

2

To paraphrase, and maybe get a more descriptive topic title, your issue is that it’s not preferable that the “community taxon area” on the right side of the page can shift other content down?

3

Basically yes, that’s the problem. Can you suggest a better subject line?

Thanks,

Tom

4

I moved it from bug reports to feature requests and updated the title; feel free to adjust.

The observation detail page isn’t optimized for speed IDing/annotating; I’d suggest using the Identify page for quicker workflows. I tend to have identifying sessions vs. annotating sessions, though some (including you :) have suggested improvements for quicker annotating while identifying.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/turn-annotations-section-into-a-table-with-check-boxes/10967
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/optimize-the-user-interface-for-annotating/7662/3
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-keyboard-shortcuts-for-annotations-in-identify-mode/6276