1 Topic by Syrphus

  • Syrphus
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  • From: Strathpeffer, Highland
  • Registered: 16-12-2008
  • Posts: 535

Topic: IMT, boundaries and layers

I have tonight found the first real advantage I have seen so far in the new Gateway, but it took a while to get there, floundering through the morass of unnecessary, inconsistent and misleading links and buttons that characterises the new site.

If I am looking at a species distribution in the IMT, I am invited to ‘Add species , habitats and site boundaries to the map’.  Since I wanted to add an SSSI boundary, I found the specific SSSI in the list, clicked, and apart from a zoom in no boundary appeared.  After some experimentation, I discovered that before I could see the boundary, I had to add the layer ‘Sites of Scientific Interest in Scotland’ (sic - not SSSI, which is used in some entries; it took a while before it dawned on me that the abbreviation was not matching what I wanted).

Suggestion 1 - if you invite people to add a boundary, and you offer a specific SSSI from the start, please assume that anyone choosing it will want to see a boundary.  Solution - if an SSSI is selected, the *software* should generate the necessary layer, not rely on the user to waste even more time on it, then zoom to the chosen site.  Ditto for SPA, SAC, NNR etc.

Suggestion 2 - include ‘SSSI’ in the options list wherever the full name appears in an option so that it matches ‘SSSI’ in the filter box.  Ditto for SPA, SAC, NNR etc.

Now here is something you never thought you would read from me - that facility is great, and allowed me to do something that I could not do even through the SNH site.  But (it had to come) I still had to adjust the opacity manually to see the topography beneath the turqoise blob, so:

Suggestion 3 - I have suggested this before elsewhere - please set the colours by default with reduced opacity, and any other settings that mean we don’t always have to guddle with the toolbox to get a display that is helpful.

And a final question - why does it take two clicks to get from the home page to the IMT when one click would be simpler for everyone?

M.

Syrphus's Website

2 Reply by Graham French

  • Graham French
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  • Registered: 23-05-2006
  • Posts: 430

Re: IMT, boundaries and layers

Hello Murdo

Thanks for you comments re adding sites to the interactive mapping tool.

Your suggestion 1 of automatically adding the site layer when zooming in to a site has been raised for consideration for future development. One issue is what should then happen when zooming into a 10km grid square which are treated as sites in the system and so should then require an associated layer.

Suggestion 2. The search relies on the name of the site as provided by the dataset provider, these are not changed by the NBN Gateway. If it contains SSSI then it will be picked up in the search. The site layers currently do not contain abbreviations (full list on https://data.nbn.org.uk/Site_Datasets page) and these would need to be added for the search to pick them up. On searching for a site using the interactive map the name of the layer that contains it is included below the site name in the drop down list. This should help when searching for the relevant site layer

Suggestion 3: Reducing opacity by default is on the list of suggested improvements

Final question. Currently you do need to select the Interactive Map Tool section in the homepage to go to the link which is the same as the other reporting tools eg Search by location, Grid Map. If you wish to go directly to the interactive mapping tool then you could bookmark the URL: https://data.nbn.org.uk/imt/#3-17.368,4 … 57,60.556. This URL has been designed similar to the 'Get Map URL' on the old site ie by saving the URL you can then go directly to the map as displayed in subsequent visits without the need to re add layers etc.

Best wishes

Graham
NBN Technical Liaison Officer

Graham French's Website

3 Reply by Syrphus

  • Syrphus
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  • From: Strathpeffer, Highland
  • Registered: 16-12-2008
  • Posts: 535

Re: IMT, boundaries and layers

Thanks, Graham.  Despite appearances, I am trying to be constructive!

On the abbreviated site names, the point is the internal inconsistency.  Some sites *are* identified by the abbreviation (SSSI - several, SAC - 1, NNR - one slightly odd example, no SPA that I could find, but the returns were too many to check all of them, LNR - 4).  It is not fair to pass this back to the suppliers of the lists.  The Gateway should be designed to accommodate the lists supplied to it in a way that most benefits the user.  That should be one of the first considerations of the site design.  If you can’t change the list items, it would take half an hour and a couple of lines of code to allow return of 'Sites of …' when SSSI was entered, and similarly for the other designations, and the benefits to users would be considerable (especially to those who have to discover the current quirks by trial and error as I did).

On the links, yes we can all have direct shortcuts to individual pages (I have had these since the site went live specifically to avoid unnecessary navigation), but the home page of an integrated site should give one-click access to all the main pages.  As it is, the links to the IMT, Search by Location and grid map give a couple of lines of description that could easily (and far more conveniently) be included in the label for the first link, doing away with the need for the second click.  It adds nothing to the sum of human happiness and vastly increases the irritation of folk like me who should be your greatest supporters, but who are already utterly dismayed at the overall loss of functionality and increase in time and clumsiness compared with the Gateway we had until October.  If you think my comments verge on the negative, you should hear some that have been expressed to me by others!

Murdo

Syrphus's Website