Nikkei Album 1.0 launched!

vkm's picture
Submitted by vkm on Mon, 05/21/2007 - 16:01.

We're very excited to announce that the Nikkei Album tool has been upgraded to version 1.0. This version addresses the major bugs of the beta testing version and includes some re-organization and enhancements that we hope will make it more user-friendly for site visitors and contributors.

We're still working on a few tweaks, but would appreciate your feedback. We've incorporated some of the suggested improvements that have been posted here and by email, and would really love to know what you think. Although we've launched version 1.0, we are already planning on future enhancements to Nikkei Album, so your input would be most helpful.

If you'd like to learn about the new features of Nikkei Album version 1.0, please join us at our workshop this Saturday, May 26, 2007. Click here for details about the workshop >>

‹ Nikkei Album version 1.0 Tutorial Interactive timeline view bug ›

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feedback
Submitted by Oregon Nikkei on Wed, 05/23/2007 - 11:57.

The album looks nice...however, it is now a bit unclear to us how you edit a collection item. We FINALLY saw how to do it by logging in and clicking on our collection and then the "Details" button, but it wasn't quite obvious.

Part of the problem for us was that clicking on the "Main" edit button and clicking on the "Edit this Collection" link at the bottom of the main collection page brought us to two different (but nearly identical) edit pages, and one of the pages didn't have clickable buttons to edit the other features of the collection. I think these two edit links are supposed to lead to the same page? We had tried the "Edit this Collection" link first, not immediately realizing that the orange ovals were clickable buttons and that the "Main" oval lead to an edit page.

In any case, it would be nice if the "Details" button said something more like "Item Details". Ironically, just saying "Details" is a bit vague! It would also be nice if from the "My collections" page, there were an edit option, instead of just publish, unpublish, delete and add.

Thanks for all the hard work!

Thanks for your feedback!!
vkm's picture
Submitted by vkm on Wed, 05/23/2007 - 15:59.
Thank you very much for taking the time to look through our upgraded Nikkei Album and provide your feedback. Please keep them coming! It's definitely very helpful. Regarding the problems and comments, please see my responses below. I hope they answer your questions.
Problem with Main edit button/Edit this collection link: The bug is actually that those "Edit this Collection/Contributed Item" links are not supposed to be there. The only way you should be able to edit the descriptive information about the content is by clicking on the "Main" edit button. I will alert our programmer and ask him to fix that.
Edit buttons confusion: We spent a lot of time coming to a decision about what to name these buttons. Based on usability testing and feedback from beta version users, it was determined that we needed to provide more explanation. However, having so much information on a single page was too overwhelming which is why we decided to break them down into more manageable chunks on separate pages. The names were chosen to be consistent in phrasing across all buttons while keeping them short so that they were easily legible and recognizable once you know what they lead to. Would it help to provide more explicit instructions at the top? I'll try to make some changes and see if that helps.
Edit from "My collections" page: The Update options on the "My collections" and "My items" pages are really intended to allow users to implement a mass publish/delete across multiple items/collections. Because you can only edit one collection or item at a time, we could not include it as part of that menu. From your "My collections" page, clicking on any of the images or title links will take you to your collection where you can use the edit buttons to update specific types of content. Also, since we broke up the editing functions across multiple pages, it would have been overwhelming to add so many different edit options from the "My collections" page.
If you have any other additional comments, suggestions, or bug reports, please let us know. Thank you so much for your support!

reply
Submitted by Oregon Nikkei on Thu, 05/24/2007 - 11:25.

Would it help to provide more explicit instructions at the top? I'll try to make some changes and see if that helps.

Yes, I think that would be helpful. If there's room, possibly discrete but brief instructions as to what each invidual button does. Also, the instructions at the top were so small compared to the orange buttons immediately beneath that we didn't even see them at first, and the instructions were obviously helpful once we noticed them. On the whole, I think it was a great idea to split up the editing features into smaller bits.

One design comment: I like that the new editing buttons look more like the buttons all around the site, but most of the other buttons (like the ones at the bottom of each page) are contained within a larger blue-green background. If that background color isn't only used for the very top and very bottom of each page, it would be nice if the editing buttons could be surrounded with a similar motif.

I should explain that the reason we even had to edit our collection pages was because we had a comment about clicking on the picture to learn more (what the "View original item" link does), but that feature seems to have changed to a pop-up window with a larger picture. Which is totally fine, but we did need to delete that sentence.

Overall, really excellent work!