Universal Viewer Discussion Documents

uv-discuss.md

Update, March 2019

Many of the discussions below have been synthesised into this slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zAmXDlfvuwlQtp9uVgFLS7RVcfNqTcyEJybnNdQ2TgY

The links below are more comprehensive and are kept here for posterity. The other document worth considering is this:

Universal Viewer design principles
(in progress) Inspired by discussions at UVCON; an attempt to set out some guiding principles for the UV; comments sought!

One or two of the issues mentioned in this doc (arising from UVCON) have been addressed in the UV.

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2018 Discussion, mainly for Washington

Stanford UX proposals
Google-doc discussion of Stanford's UX proposals, prepared for UVCON.

UV Search, revised design for comments
Updated search UI proposal from Stanford, after UVCON

• intended to be extension of current design language
• concerns about search in footer - not the place for it?
• could put it in a tab - but that ties it to the content panel. Search button could expose input field on click.
• Concerns about mobile version

UV Search, Adobe XD in response to above

• Experiments with white and black backgrounds
• concern over sliding panel, dependency on content panel

UV Search, 'Fully panel-ized'

• Frees search from dependency on content panel, but problem: if there is a content panel you have to close search to get to its CTA
• Suggestion - vertically stacked icons - like the Adobe XD UI here (look at XD, not the UV)
• but: "It means you can't have Metadata and Contents open at the same time, though, and I think that came out as a requirement in London"
• How crucial is multiple panels? And does this really prevent that? And what about mobile? Relationship between overlays (dialogs) and panels (shift over)

Look at conflicts between panel and popups - NLW Map And with a book

• user needs to be able to interact with the image/object as well as the results list, which made a panel seem like a necessity. But I think it's possible to allow a popup to stay present without being modal
• How does this relate to the textual content of an object?
• still chevrons, which don't test well

We need to discuss the relationship between "Search" and another as yet non-existent component of the UI, which is the non-primary content of the object. This may be transcriptions, comments, other annos as per #4. And consider the BL's AV textual content requirements.

Radical suggestion - is there really a "Search panel" at all? Or is search instead an important piece of interaction within a "Content" panel (NB - not "Contents" which is TOC)

Universal Viewer design principles
(in progress) Inspired by discussions at UVCON; an attempt to set out some guiding principles for the UV; comments sought!

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Conversations in Slack followed... Locations of buttons, grouping of functionality in tabs/panels/stacked icons; where Search lives

The Farringdon Interpretation
How the UV deals with structural navigation in time-based media (a very detailed dive into one design principle)

Funding the Universal Viewer
There's a big chunk of work to do. How do we pay for it?

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Related documents (not UV-specific, but of UV interest)

IIIF and Born Digital

IIIF and 3D

In case (when) it disappears from Slack, I'm adding this image here:

Additional links for discussion:

Prototypes

• Text content of image-based content: https://5bd334fbb13fb141d1fca696--canvas-panel.netlify.com/developer-stories/viewer1.html
• Text content of time-based media: https://openhypervideo.github.io/iiif-interactive-transcript/

And this is the "Adobe XD UI" style mentioned above.

It's worth noting that this is the approach taken by the emerging Mirador 3 designs.
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/iiif-discuss/F3TPeKmuj4U

An assumption, to be challenged:

• The UV offers a consistent, comfortable, familiar UI across different types of media.
• If I've used the UV to view a manuscript from a BL catalogue search result, I'll feel at home if I encounter the UV when looking at the National Radio Archive

If this consistency is not a requirement, then the NRA doesn't need to use the UV. But I think it is; reduction of viewers in the BL estate is not just a code/configuration management issue, it's a UX issue too (again, this assumption may be challenged).

Problems to solve:

• Sparkline for results doesn't test well and runs out of room
  • Is mistaken for interactive navigational element (drag to change position in object)
• Search is of textual content because text terms are what we feed it
• ...but textual content is (or is part of):
  • plain text with arbitrary result precision (dynamically returned annos, e.g., Wellcome)
  • fragments (lines or paras of text, or temporal fragments of broadcasts)
  • complex annotations from crowdsourcing or machine learning processes (NLW tithes, libcrowds?)
• We want to view textual content, or more broadly, annotation content
• and we want to search the object, which indirectly means searching that annotation content
• If "view content" is a panel, how does it relate to search? As per jvine, a Search call-to-action shouldn't be hidden inside a content panel that may not be revealed.
• Possible solution is "Adobe XD style" where [0] is a CTA to both view and search content (and various flavours of search may be available along with the content, including none at all).
  • you have to be looking at (have revealed) textual content to search it.

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[0] = magnifying glass symbol.

• And finally, what is our process for deciding all this within the UV community? What's the approach to product management?