User Interface Issues
+Discussion
Hi. I'm holding a Master's degree in computer science, but after 15 minutes I still haven't figured out how to add a metric to a company. Please help. Also, the GUI is very slow and unresponsive. Why are there numerical IDs coded into the URLs? Basically I would sugguest to always display and "Add Item"-Button right next to the information type displayed, so that users can input the information type once they see that its possible to manage something like metrics.
I don't fully understand the concept of a "claim" yet. How about tooltip texts complaining the essentials?
Sorry for complaining about the UI. Thank you for this site.Its an awesome project anyways.
Very kind regards,
Michael
Hi Michael,
Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you're running into. We've just deployed a lot of new code, and the new interface has some kinks to iron out.
One of the big changes was that "Claims" were renamed to "Notes", but we have yet caught every old reference to Claims. Notes are explained in a few places; does that address that need?
When you say "unresponsive", you mostly mean that things are slow, correct? Performance optimization is a big focus now; I hope we'll have things moving more quickly quite soon. (I agree, that's annoying).
As for the numerical IDs, that depends on which URLS you mean. The Sources have numbers in there canonical names, because it's possible for many sources to have duplicate names (and we don't have a clear naming pattern to prevent sources from overlapping with notes).
You might also being seeing some URLs with a tilde in them. To explain that, I should mention that WikiRate is built with a tool called Wagn (which itself will soon be renamed to "Decko"), and that, like all Wagn sites, the site uses building blocks called "cards". Each card has a unique name (which can change) and a unique id (which can't). Are the IDs creeping into the interface in a way that's distracting? Where were you running into them?
Finally, the most involved question (and perhaps the most important) is the issue of how to add a metric for a company. Is your question about adding a value for an existing metric or about adding a new metric?
For the case of adding a new metric, it's not really our intention to make it easy to add those from, say, a company page, because a good metric takes a lot of design. Our thought is that if someone just adds a metric casually, it won't be conducive to generating robust, standardized data.
That said, what we DO *want* to serve well but currently serve poorly is adding new values for existing metrics on companies that don't have them. Our notion there is that the list of metrics should be able to serve not only as a list of metrics that the company has values for, but also of metrics that aren't yet measured. So, basically, if you knew of a metric you wanted to provide a value for, you could add it there in place. (There would be a similar pattern of searching for companies on the metrics pages) Maybe we should raise the priority on that one; would that make a difference for you?
Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback. Hope you'll stick around long enough to see things improve!
Out of curiosity, did you have a specific metric in mind? Any chance we can help get it on here?
Eh very sorry for the late response. I did not get emailed... I mean: being on a company page, how do I add a metric value?
Hi Michael, if you click follow on the top right of any card you can start to follow - then you should get notifications about updates.
On a company page it's not easy to add a metric value currently; as metrics are only shown on a company page when there are values available (or else there would be loads of empty metrics all over the site). We could add this to the interface, but I'm not sure if it's a net positive.
If you want to add a value about a company for an existing metric, then the easiest place to do it is from a metric page itself.
Does that sound reasonable? (i'll email you in parallel in case you don't see this)
I encountered the "follow" menu item. When I click it, the screen goes greyish, like the content is meant to be displayed out of focus, as if a modal dialog should be in front, but there is none. I use firefox latest version, official built. Disabled adblock plus and disabled ghostery for your site. Firebug shows no errors. The UI just freezes when I press "follow".
But anyways, when a users starts or participates a discussion, he should be "auto-follow" anyways. I really think thats common and its rather surprising not to be notified automatically.
My idea about the metric was just that I read that this German company HC Starck (similar to Glencore) is reporting according to the Dodd Frank act and member of some initiatives, ITRI Tin Supply Chain Initiative (iTSCi) and more (all written there: https://www.hcstarck.com/en/hc_starck_group/press/press_releases/2015/hc_starcks_tungsten_supply_chain_declared_compliant_with_conflict_free_smelter_program.html).
Now I would like to register the information that the company is members of these groups. I would use a binary metric for this:
metric "is member of ITSCi" - domain value range : 'yes' , 'no'.
Right now I don't know the value of any of these initiatives they are claiming to be a member of. But I just guess thats what would be the value of crowd sourced information gathering: One user add the informationen that the company is a member of whatever alliance, the next user might vote the metric as garbage, because the alliance is a marketing label, representing CSR from the view of a marketing & sales department.
For me as a consumer it would be very important to see that Apple is a member of the Fair Labor Association. And then I would really like to make it visually clear to the reader that the Fair Labor Association does not mean that there is any fair labor, just means they do a CSR report.
Don't be afraid of users adding conflicting or useless metrics... just let the users vote on them. I mean on a broader scope you cannot know what your users want. Some may want to mark certain makeup manufacturers as "vegan" .
At least I feel slightly frustrated by not beeing simply able to add a company as being member of a relevant group in terms of structured information. If I need for an admin to add a metric he might consider useless, and then tell me "For the case of adding a new metric, it's not really our intention to make it easy to add those from, say, a company page, because a good metric takes a lot of design", then this clearly isn't the way of motivating more contributors for your project. I mean on a crowd sourced page, who do you expect to judge about what is good design?
Sorry for the bad vibrations. Please really email me when you answer, bc the 'follow' doesnt work ... michael.leben@lebensland.de
Hey Michael,
You can add a metric quickly here: http://wikirate.org/Metrics by clicking add metric.
We're trying to create the most intuitive interface; but we're open to criticism where required.
I think the comment may have come across wrong from Ethan - we do want people to create their own metrics; they just need to have all fields populated to be valuable - e.g. context (rationale for creation) Methodology (how to populate), range of values and units (what's being measured).
Once you add the metric about a particular initiative, you can start to add whether a company is a member (y/n values) from the metric page.
We are working on the metric and rating interface at the moment. Actually, soon it will be possible to add values for metrics from a company page too.
Maybe have a go and let us know you hit any walls? I'm happy to help wherever possible.
Sorry for your problems with the follow. Will look into the points you raised; or maybe some of the dev team might respond more directly on here. We are trying to strike the balance between not being bombarded with mails and being notified about what's important to you. Understandably you're missing content that you're interested in though. I will email in parallel; but it's good to have the discussion here too for anyone encountering similar problems or questions.
Today I try to add for Company "Vaude" metric "Is a member of FairWear Foundation" = yes.
(I suggest you to have special binary metrics called "tags". Users want to tag things. Why is the user name part of the metric? I don't feel to well with that.)
With the help of your last post, I finally succeeded in creating a metric "FairWearMember" (yeah!!) but now I don't find the button of how to add the metric to Vaude (yes), but I read someone has already entered in free text the info...
I try to re-find my own metric with the search function. Not listed, or so (needs to be approved or uprated first?),it finds lots of "FairWear" pages that are empty,probably autocreated when I tagged a source or Note with fairtrade. When I go to my user profile and click on "things I created", It shows me everything anybody created ever.
On the Vaude company page, It says 0 metrics, but there is no " Add metric (value)" button visible. I managed to add a Source, lets me upvote my source , but how do I register the metric value now?
On the metric page, no "add company" button visible neither.
Please help me, again :-)
You can't currently add values for new metrics from the company page; that will be available soon. (Basically, you'll be able to change the filtering to show companies that don't have values yet).
We'll also be improving the search results, but as a workaround you can get there by autocompleting the full metric name ("Michael_Leben+FairWear"). You'd have to autocomplete Michael Leben first then type "+".
On http://wikirate.org/Michael_Leben+FairWear, you can click "add new value" to add a new Company. (We're redesigning that interface as well). You could also import multiple values. I hear that you were looking for "Add new Company" rather than "add new value". The latter is more precise, because you can add a new value even for an existing company that way, but we need to make sure it's findable.
I'm concerned about why your autofollowing is not working; we'll try to get that fixed this week. By default you're supposed to be configured to following everything you've edited, but I can see on your profile page that is not turned on. More on that soon; thanks for persisting even without that.
Re "Don't be afraid of users adding conflicting or useless metrics... just let the users vote on them." That's exactly right. We're not afraid of flawed design per se, and users can add whatever they like. But we do think users will be frustrated if they put a lot of work into designing a metric, only to find later that it was problematic in a way that would get them voted down. The barriers will get lower and lower as we refine our interface, but as we do that we also want to make it easier and easier to make metrics useful from the start.
Re "Why is the user name part of the metric?" - this is because many different designers might want to use given metric title, eg "Climate Change Score". Using the user (or organization) name means there can be multiple metrics with the same title, and it also appeals to the many contributors (especially advocacy groups) who want to promote their work. We have had some discussion of allowing the creation of user groups to use as this name part, precisely because some users might be less comfortable using their name. This is currently considered a lower priority than the other changes mentioned, but if you're saying it could make a difference in your interest in contributing, we would give that a lot of weight.
Hi Michael,
I'm glad to see you digging in. I hope that some or all of the problems you encountered are fixed now. If you go to your profile page: http://wikirate.org/Michael_Leben - you can see everything you created and should also be able to edit your follow setting there too.
Regarding the metric naming format, does Ethan's comment above answer your question or are you still confused as to how it works? Perhaps the confusion is about how to find metrics that you created. I understand why it may be more intuitive to search for the metric name to start with rather than yourname+metricname.
In terms of adding a value it's pretty simple: once you get to the Fairwear metric (http://wikirate.org/Michael_Leben+FairWear) either from your page of what you created/ directly from the metric page, click add value. Sorry you didn't find it the first time, but feedback is always helpful.
Will email in parallel.
Best,
Vishal
We haven't deployed many fixes yet but will soon. If not this week then next.