In an earlier bug-fix thread I proposed several possible improvements to the UI for annotations. The bug is now fixed, but I wanted to record these UI suggestions here as a way to feed them into any future redesign:
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Display the phenology options in their logical/conventional sequence: Budding, Flowering, Fruiting (this also applies to phenology input fields). This just conforms to user expectations and makes interpreting the output easier.
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Use colors better aligned with users’ expectations. Obviously each phenology has a whole range of colors in different species, but I’m going to suggest that users would associate green more with Budding and orange/red with Fruiting. Then pick some contrasting color for flowering – Blue is fine.
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Add a total observation count in the box that appears on mouseover. So for the example given, the header would be something like “4 Observations Total in July”. This allows a user to make some sense of the phenology stats.
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Maybe don’t show “No Annotation” in the mouseover when the count is zero for that month.
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More explicitly, calculate a percentage for each phenology state and display it in in the mouseover box. Again, if a phenology state has zero associated observations for that month, then 0 should be fine (no need to also show “0%”). In the example I used, this would show something like this:
- Budding: 4 (100%)
- Flowering: 4 (100%)
- Fruiting: 1 (25%)