I appreciate your input. In terms of onboarding, I think it’s valuable to see the perspective of members such as you who haven’t been around long enough to pick up the wealth of tacit knowledge that it takes to use the system smoothly but – and this would probably be a minority of new members – are invested in the system enough to put in the effort of describing what works well and what’s really not obvious to you yet.
I remember, for example, needing to have it explained to me that the computer vision works a whole lot better if one fills in the location first before trying to look up the species, though species name is closer to the top of the observation box.
One small thing I’ve wondered about, which may belong in a different thread: I would estimate that, except for the Observations page, I use the Taxa Info more frequently than all the other menu items combined, yet it’s not a top level menu item. Other members will have different usage patterns, of course.
Also, I wonder how many complete newbies, especially ones who are still in school, would wonder, “What’s a taxa?” If I go to the knowledge base and search for the word, I find several articles, the first of which is among the General FAQs but is still not geared to someone who doesn’t know what a taxon even is. There are no matches if I search for “glossary”. It’d be really nice to have a glossary in a location where newbies could find it easily, and even nicer if it could be filtered by level so that newbies could easily find fundamental terms like “node” or “thorax” without having to sift through reams of technical terms such as, say, “hemelytra”.