EDS ux feedback

[Keith Hazelton]

On Mar 11, 2013, at 06:52:56, Peter Schober wrote:

> I've had some feedback today from local Typo3 programmers who never
> had seen the EDS (or another DS except for the old SWITCH WAYF with
> the institution dropdown list) before and they had a couple of issues
> in trying to use the EDS. JFYI/FWIW:
> 
> * They typed "University" into the input field (which is probably the
> most characters you can type without gaining any real
> differentiation, in our case)

Some DS implementations allow substring searches.  What about EDS?  In my own case at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after typing "university" once, and seeing what happened, I switched to typing "mad".  In DS implementations supporting substring search that leads to a manageably short pick list.

Maybe some hint, perhaps a strong one, to avoid using the word "university"?  Not sure if there are other clinkers in the list of search terms. 

      --Keith

> 
> * and wondered why their institution didn't show up. Because
> we set this.alwaysShow=true and this.maxResults < no. of IdPs.
> 
> * Personally I find the UX of a long list of institutions -- when
>   setting this.maxResults to a high number -- popping up at the
>   first entered character to be worse, esp when typing more
>   characters does not seem to change the list at all, in the
>   pathological case of "University".
> 
> * No idea whether the alternative suggestion from them -- adding a
>   scroll bar to the list when there are more than this.maxResults to
>   the dynamic list -- is doable or desirable.
> 
> * As returning users they where not aware that they could click on the
> institution's logo or name below the logo to actually select this
> IdP (no sure what they thought is was being displayed for).
> Maybe this is owed to the German translation (which simply states
> "Previous selection", basically) that does not eve have a verb in
> it. I'll change that locally for now.
> 
> There were other issues with entities not showing up but these are
> more or less well-known and related to language selection and
> unexpected i18n. (The EDS will search for entered strings in the
> localized version of the mdui data, and if the EDS doesn't guess the
> language from the user agent correctly it doesn't find localized
> strings. E.g. the EDS in English won't show anything if you're looking
> for "Universität" -- unless an institution actually had German strings
> in their xml:lang="en" display name.)
> Once the EDS can switch i18n based on request headers (sent back via
> the DiscoFeed) I hope this is less of an issue.
> -peter
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