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%)
Just a note for the color issue. People with red/green color blindness would find those charts challenging to interpret. I would like to request a more accessible color scheme.
7 Likes
Do phenology graphs take into account seasonal differences between Northern Hemisphere and Southern? I tried to gauge it by looking at random taxa, the best I could find (in a brief hunt) was:
https://inaturalist.nz/taxa/61827-Amaryllis-belladonna
which kind of suggests maybe not.
I don’t use phenology much myself, but I would imagine that being able to restrict the graph to North, South, or both Hemispheres data would be useful? I’m just adding this to the pool of “possible future considerations for any revamp” :)
Yes, you can take hemisphere into account. Not by selecting north or south, but you can restrict the graph to place. Like Florida, USA, or Australia. There is a linke above and to the right of your screenshot that you can change the place. I think by default, it is the world. Which seems like it would always give bimodal distributions if you have a cosmopolitan species
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Good point. I’m happy for any revision of the color-coding to respect common forms of color blindness. The current colors are red, green, orange and blue, so they pose the same problem for people with red/green color blindness. It should be possible to choose a shade/intensity of green to indicate budding that is sufficiently different from the shade of orange/red/brown that indicates fruiting.