Hi Tim, thanks for your comments.
On 06/04/11 02:53, Tim Donohue wrote: > On 4/4/2011 11:39 PM, Andrea Schweer wrote: Andrea gave you some > ideas of places to potentially get started. Though, I'll admit, the > idea of making the submission process configurable via the Web > Interface is potentially a bit complex (i.e. it's likely out-of-scope > for this particular GSoC project). For background on the > complexities, see discussion here: > https://wiki.duraspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=23268096&focusedCommentId=25068048#comment-25068048 > > So, a part of me feels that this particular GSoC project would need > to be more tightly scoped to Improving UI Usability (or Accessibility > or both). It would likely need to avoid digging into deeper issues > of reworking the entire underlying workflow logic, as that could be > a rather large project in itself. However, that being said, if we > found a DSpace committer/mentor interested in mentoring that larger > 'underlying logic' project, we could likely pull together a separate > GSoC project which could *begin* that refactoring work (If any > committer is interested in this, please get in touch!). But, I feel > that's a separate GSoC project altogether, and shouldn't be combined > with improvements to UI Usability or Accessibility. Ok, sounds good to me -- I haven't mentored GSoC projects before and so I'm not entirely sure about what's realistically achievable in one. > As you may be able to tell, this "Improve Submitter User Experience" > project idea is less "defined" than some of the others, as it came > up during discussions just last week. However, we do have some > institutions (namely Ohio State University) which have done some > recent usability studies on the Submission User Interface, who may be > able to help us better define what areas of the UI may require extra > work. In addition to the usability studies, it may also be worthwhile to ask dspace repository managers (eg via the dspace-general mailing list) what issues they encounter frequently, or to go through the dspace mailing list archives and look for e-mails that indicate usability issues with the submission UI (eg a very recent e-mail to dspace-tech: http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/hxciqKvsiLQklYim436e). Problems I've heard about from the repository managers I work with are actually quite basic usability issues: - You're only told when you try to go to the next step that you didn't fill in a required field - There is no feedback while files are being uploaded -- this can cause problems when the submitter is on a slow network connection and/or the files are large - The "initial questions" step could be handled in the "Describe" step instead - It's currently not possible to re-order eg subject keywords without removing and re-adding them. Thinking about the user experience a bit more broadly, there are additional improvements that could be made (probably implemented as custom Steps): - Don't require the submitter to type in information that already exists electronically -- pull the metadata from elsewhere (citeulike, crossref doi lookup, bibtex upload...) and then just let the submitter confirm it - Try to ensure high-quality, consistent metadata values. For some fields, this can already be done using authority control; other fields (eg subject keywords) could probably do with some help. This could be an integration with Discovery to autocomplete keywords that are already in the system and/or auto-suggested keywords via keyphrase extraction. cheers, Andrea -- Andrea Schweer IRR Technical Specialist, ITS Information Systems The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Xperia(TM) PLAY It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. And it wants your games. http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev _______________________________________________ Dspace-devel mailing list Dspace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-devel
