User feedback + Design Directions

Last month, we did a short user feedback session with the data team that have been actively using OSMCha for the daily validation work. Using this ticket to document what was discussed and planning next steps.

Here are the key pain points that were highlighted in the conversation:

BBox + Filter

• Favorite filters: No easy way to keep track of filter combinations that one might use regularly
• Notifications: No way to know if there are new changesets for a particular filter — especially useful with one/multiple bbox set as my area and get notifications for new results
• Logic operators: Can’t exclude certain values/filters using a NOT (!) operator
• Tag-based filters: No way to extensively filter for a particular tag, like looking for all changesets that add fire hydrant(s)

List of Changesets

• Auto refresh list: Once some changesets are checked, the list doesn’t auto-refresh, so you need to refresh everytime — which is slow if there are several changesets in the result
• Pagination controls: You can’t control how many changesets show on each page (set to 15) or jump pages quickly (without editing url) — which makes some low signal queries hard to parse through
• User details: Apart from user name and changeset comment, showing more user specific details (like user ratings from HDYC, edit count etc.) can help identify potentially harmful edits quicker

Individual changeset page

• Multiple tabs: Due to the slow speed of changeset map (or loading errors), folks in data team tend to open multiple changesets in tabs (~3) in one go so the others load while they examine one.
• Discussions: Not seeing changeset comments in this view means they might spend a lot of time on a changeset that might already have been flagged by the community

Changeset details & actions

• User details: Generally head to OSM to see join date, description, edit count, diary post count, active blocks + history
• View changeset in OSM: This helps see any major visual breakage on a map quickly — the OSM map style shows more detail than Mapbox Streets/Dark style
• View feature list in OSM: In some cases, it helps to see all the features, not just the suspicious ones
• Opening in JOSM: For complex changesets, opening directly in JOSM doesn’t work (slow/too large bbox) — instead folks in data team tend to zoom into particular part of changeset in OSM or select a feature from the list and then load that bbox or feature in JOSM
• Actual reason vs possible reason: No way to specify what was actually wrong in the changeset (for analytics or machine learning)
• Tracking status: No way to track if something that was marked harmful was fixed (reverted), or still not reverted, or get notifications if there’s an activity on the changeset (this would be a workflow overhead though)
• Tracking action: No way to specify what was done: was a harmful changeset reverted completely, fixed (partially), comment was left on changeset or something else
• Leaving a comment: No way to quickly leave a comment, so tend to go to OSM comments for this

Mark as harmful/valid

• Actions: They generally don’t mark all valid changesets, only the harmful ones

cc @batpad @geohacker @ajithranka @kepta @willemarcel

[rasagy]

Some more feedback in the wild (OSM-talk, Diary post comments) on OSMCha or the needs of such a tool is in this gist, will keep updating as I come across more such feedback. cc @planemad @maning

[kepta]

Closing this ticket as the discussion has moved on to #17 cc @rasagy