Re: Piggy Bank blocks find as you type (+ comments)

From: Michael McDougall <mcdougall_at_grammatech.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 10:00:45 -0400

Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:

>Michael McDougall wrote:
>
>
>
>>The web page says: "Report problems and ask for
>>new features through our issue tracking system
>><http://simile.mit.edu/issues/secure/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10021>". I
>>followed the link to the issue tracking but after several frustrating
>>minutes I gave up trying to find some way of submitting a bug.
>>
>>
>
>I have to agree with one thing: most (all?) issue tracking systems force
>you to create an account to be able to submit bug reports.
>
>The mozilla foundation identified this as a problem as well and created
>'hendrix' (see http://hendrix.mozilla.org/).
>
>Do you think something like this would help?
>
>
>
Yes. That would be great. You'll get feedback from people (like me) who
want to help out but aren't (yet) willing to invest the energy to create
yet another bugzilla account.

If you get me hooked on Piggy Bank I'll happily sign up for all your
issue tracking and email lists.

>
>
>>In
>>fact, I went through all of this a few weeks ago when I hit the same
>>problem (find stopped working) in addition to other issues and I wasted
>>20 minutes trying to give feedback before giving up.
>>
>>
>
>20 minutes to find the you needed to login? or you went past that? (not
>trying to be dense, just curious)
>
>
I just went back to the issue tracking page at
http://simile.mit.edu/issues/secure/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10021 and I
started writing about how there's no link that says "report an issue" or
"create an account". I then realized that wasn't quite right--there's a
small link at the bottom of the page that says "bug/feature request"
which gets you started on the process. However, it's at the buried at
bottom of the page in small type, next to the "Powered by.." section
that is usually ignorable on most web sites. I recommend moving this
link higher and making it bigger and clearer: "Report a bug or suggest a
new feature". Or have a separate page for newbies that says "Would you
like to report a bug? You need to create an account. Here's how..." and
link to that from the Piggy Bank page.

Also, some of the 20 minutes was spent searching and backtracking on
various Piggy Bank pages, looking for some way to report feedback. I
would try the issue tracker, check out the mailing lists, look for
people's email addresses, go back to the issue tracker, etc. And maybe
the 20 minutes was not scientifically measured :)

>
>
>>- If I'm browsing the web and I want Piggy Bank to record data I have to
>>do at least 2 clicks--one to click the coin, one to click "save all".
>>That's a hassle, and I'm not likely to do it since for a given page the
>>Piggy Bank interface doesn't give me a whole lot more than the plain
>>HTML view does. It would be nicer if Piggy Bank collected stuff in the
>>background for all pages I visit, and then I can have a bunch of data
>>about my interests without any extra effort.
>>
>>
>
>We were unsure ourselves of what is the best way to do these things.
>
>In piggy Bank 1.0, a sidebar was always populated with the results of
>the page, but the speed of your browsing is damaged and it felt most of
>the time intrusive (don't know about you but the amount of information I
>would want to capture is a lot less than what I browse, not sure I would
>like to pay a speed price for information I'm unlikely to use or even
>care for).
>
>We could allow you to save all the info with a single click. That would
>make things a lot faster and would require only one click. (or we could
>assign a key binding for that, so you would just hit, say '.' and it
>would be saved)
>
>Comments?
>
>
I can see how this would be tricky.

Ideally, the searching would happen silently in the background in such a
way that the browsing speed wasn't damaged. If someone jumps from one
page to another the searches for the old page would just stop (perhaps
discarding information that was only partially retrieved). I'm sure this
is easier said than done, and probably requires some javascript voodoo
that I know little about.

A single keystroke would be a nice approximation if what I describe is
not feasible. (But don't mess with my find-as-you-type!)

Also, in case all this complaining is getting you down: the Piggy Bank
UI was very impressive--by far the best Semantic Web related UI I've seen.

Michael
Received on Thu Jul 21 2005 - 13:57:44 EDT

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