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

From: Stefano Mazzocchi <stefanom_at_mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 21:21:42 -0400

Michael McDougall wrote:
> 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.

My sellfish side tells me that it's better to push for the second to
happen than to make it easier to get the first in ;-)

The reason is that while mozilla has an established development
community, we don't. We might not have enough time/energy to reply to
all feedback that we might receive *and* be able to continue development.

>>> 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.

this is a feature request/bug for *jira* not for piggy-bank :-)

the real deal is the "create new issue" part of the top blue bar.

But I *DO* agree with you that it's really not the best placement for
such an important thing. I'll see what I can do to change it in the future.

> 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.

yeah, I hear you. I've put this in my todo list.

> 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 :)

eheh, I understand. The signal is "make it easier", I'll try. But I
don't want to make it "too easy" or the signal would drop.

>>> - 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.

We are not afraid of implementation complexity (if we were, we woulnd't
be working on this project ;-), but we do want to have something useful
in many different scenarios.

> 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!)

eheh, I hear you.

> Also, in case all this complaining is getting you down:

Nah, we have a thick skin :-) We only bad criticism is no criticism at
all ;-)

> the Piggy Bank
> UI was very impressive--by far the best Semantic Web related UI I've seen.

Thank you.

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi
Research Scientist                 Digital Libraries Research Group
Massachusetts Institute of Technology            location: E25-131C
77 Massachusetts Ave                   telephone: +1 (617) 253-1096
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307              email: stefanom at mit . edu
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Received on Sun Jul 24 2005 - 01:18:38 EDT

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