Strabo - Tephra Module

[mwloewen]

Notes and requested modifications from new version of Tephra Module (round 1):

Bugs:

• None Found

Strongly suggested changes:

• Layer Label prepends spot name (good) and a number (good), but these are separated by a space (bad). Suggest adding a "-" to denote the layer (this would follow nested spot convention.
• Reorder "basic" tab final items: bottom grainsize, top grainsize, grading, sorting [move grading below grainsize].
• Not really related to tephra, but Naming Conventions:IMage Basemap: Prepend Spot Name, will duplicate the parent name unless something is put in the alternate prefix field (I use a "-"). Maybe this is how it's always been but I had inherited the correct entries from

Bigger change that would be nice but not sure if possible:

• There are fundamnetally two workflows I've used with the tephra module: (a) put spots on a picture of a section, use the tephra module to add metadata to each of those spots, which represent a single "layer". There's no need to have multiple tephra layers in a spot in this case. (b) adding a bunch of layers to a single spot, which is a bit faster but of course loses the photo context. We probably need both (a) and (b), but it makes think sliek the layer label messy (see first bullet on the next header). It's also going to make it more complicated to design a consistent data output from the app. I dont' really have any idea if there is a better solution than what you have now though. Ideally there would be some workflow where you go to add tephra to a spot and it asks you, do you want to annotate layers on a photo, or just record a list of layers, and then goes into one of those two workflows. Just something to think about before this formally moves out of testing mode.

Usability changes (not urgent):

• I don't know if there is a way to change this, but Layer Label starts by adding a "1" to the parent spot, this is good if we add multiple layers to the same spot, but annoying if they are 1:1 (like when layers are annotated on an image). I'm not sure if there is a good way to avoid this.
• Easy to save multiple versions of the same layer in the popup window, I'm unsure if this is good or bad behavior: My instinct is to hit save, for instance, after finishing the "Basic" tab and again after editing the "additional" tab, and this will result in duplicate layer.s
• Required does not show at first when adding a tephra layer
• I find the popup option for adding a layer difficult to use (compared to a simpler module like samples). I would rather it just go straight to the full notepad layer edit view.

I'm going to pass my ipad around to a few other folks this week and get more feedback, these were the first things I noticed. I'll add additional notes as replies.

[jlubbersgeo]

I largely agree with much of what @mwloewen said and don't have all that much to add with the exception of one (perhaps superfluous) ask.

Currently there are required fields e.g., Thickness, Layer Type that look like:

Typical Thickness

.____________________.
Required

This is a little confusing to me and I think it would look better with something like:

Typical Thickness (Required)

.____________________.

or

Typical Thickness*

.____________________.

Where then the (Required) or * would disappear once a value was entered. In the event of the * used to denote a required field a footnote could be used to help the user: * denotes required field

[jessicagood]

• ' ' (space) changed to '-' in commit c775f18
• Basic form fields order fixed in commit 36357d6