CalBug App - Form Improvement Suggestions (1-7)
-
by
Eddie_Dunbar
CalBug Team -
My day job is as an app administrator. I have 7 suggestions that will improve user acceptance of the CalBug app.
1 Form Fields - All fields should be presented at once. Benefit: This will eliminate 9 clicks.
2 Country Selection - Primary countries should either 1) have a checkbox, or 2) a shorter selection dropdown. Benefit: This will reduce reading/scanning time for the user.
3 Date Entry #1 of 3- Years should not be presented non-linearly. Navigating linearly over 5-6 decades takes too much time to NAVIGATE and requires too much dexterity and deliberation. Benefit: The user will work more quickly.
4 Date Entry #2 of 3- Roman Numeral Date should accompany Month (e.g., 09-September should be written as IX-09-September). This will reduce the making the user have to TRANSLATE the date from Roman numeral to Standard English standard. Benefit: The user can work more quickly and accurately.
5 Date Entry #3 of 3 - Dates to be selected should be placed into a table with a column each for Roman numeral, month number and month name. This will reduce the time users have to SCAN through dates. See image (attached) for suggested alignment/format. Benefit: The user can work more quickly and accurately.
6 Notes - Specimen #1 was not in Iguala, but 23 km W of Iguala. There should be at least 64 characters dedicated to users notes. Benefit: The location data on the label will not lose its precision in the transcription.
7 Elevation Entry - This should be 2 fields instead of one. Create a (required) checkbox - one that is metric and one that is American - for easier conversion later. Benefit: Metric data will be complete and easy to convert.
Keep up the good work.
Eddie Dunbar
Posted
-
by
ljgross
scientist
Thanks Eddie -- your comments are very helpful. A few of the things you mention we've been hoping to have added/changed so it's helpful to hear that you have the same thoughts. I especially like #1. It seems having all the fields presented at once would be less confusing but it had not occurred to me that it would also eliminate 9 clicks. Even better!
Regarding #6. The whole location "23 km W of Iguala" should go into the location field. However we have thought about adding a Notes field for other information that's not otherwise being captured.
Joyce
Posted
-
I'd rather just start typing Sep and get to September. Also, most of the entries I've seen have day/month/year, and the input system has month/day/year. It'd be easier if the input format matched the display format.
Posted
-
by
SandersClan
I Eddie's ideas (especially #1). I also like Other's suggestion about starting to type the month. Maybe that would be a good idea for country, state and county as well.
Posted
-
by
SandersClan
I think it would also be a good idea to have pre-filled states for Mexico.
Posted
-
Here is one more observation about form fields. Surely this would be a rare situation, but nontheless...
There is a specimen with tagged just latitude and no longitude: http://talk.notesfromnature.org/#/subjects/ANN00007ae
So I tried to input latitude only, and then checked form - whether it accepted only one coordinate. It doesn't. So I thought it's better something than nothing and put latitude in "locality" field.Question is: does the application requires both coordinates? If it doesn't, perhaps it is OK to enable filling just one of the coordinates?
Posted
