Make the hard things simple, and the simple things occasionally surprisingly hard

I’ve run two OpenStreetMap-themed training courses recently - one for university students, and one for a Local Authority. It’s great helping even more people get started with OpenStreetMap, and as is becoming a bit of theme, I took the opportunity to observe more people getting started with OSM.

Unlike previous outings to UCL, these two sessions had “getting started” notes that I had written - not a click-by-click tutorial, but notes of what things to try in a particular order. This lead to a little embarrassment when some of the seemingly innocuous instructions turned out to be surprisingly hard!

• “Use the layer switcher to change the map layers” - the layer switcher is hard to find, even when you’re deliberately looking for it. We’re using the default “+” icon on osm.org - the stacked layers icon that I use on opencyclemap.org might be better. But I think best of all would be some rectangular buttons that are always visible. OpenLayers unfortunately makes this surprisingly hard.
• “Set your home location” - this could do with some love. People want to type in their postcode, or at least search, in order to move the map around. I also found that about half a dozen people set their home location, and pressed edit, which opens Potlatch (despite the tab being “greyed out”) at somewhere unexpected.
• “Add the person next to you as a friend” - this was a real head-slap moment when I thought about it. Given two people, sitting side by side, how do they add one another as a friend? If they are lucky, they’ve both set their home location within a hundred metres or so and show up on the list of nearby users. If not, the most straightforward way is to go to their own home page, edit the url, replace their username with the other person’s (case-sensitive) username, and then an “add as friend” link appears among all the other links. There’s so much wrong with this it’s embarrassing - or rather, embarrassing that I put the instructions in without thinking things through! A user search, and a button (rather than a link) to add as a friend, would help for a start.

The other things are things I noticed people trying to do, which are perfectly reasonable.

• Go to www.osm.org. Click help. Admire. Now try to get back to the map, without pressing “Back” or retyping the url.
• Go to help.openstreetmap.org and click on a username. Now try adding them as a friend.
• Go to www.osm.org. Switch to another map layer. Click the map key. Get a blank tab.

Some maps don’t have a key (I’m guilty of that), but showing an empty panel isn’t helpful. We also found the wrong key appearing beside the different layers, but I can’t reproduce that today. As for the integration with the help centre - I know fine and well how tough it is to integrate separate software products, but users really neither know nor care about it.

And finally some run-of-the-mill observations, mainly of Potlatch 2

• The p2 save dialog has too much text above the changeset comment field. People get bored reading it, I think because they aren’t expecting an interruption when they press save.
• It’s still unclear how to start drawing lines and areas. In fact, most people accidentally start drawing lines, and press escape, without realising later on when they want to draw one that they already know how.
• People want to add icons to points of interest that are already drawn, but as an area. Maybe we should symbolize areas, or even better, prevent icons from being dropped onto existing areas with the same tags.
• People get mightily confused when the icons on the map don’t match the icons on the sidebar. Maybe we need to rethink how the sidebar icons appear.
• Creating other points of interest is hard to figure out (i.e. double-click).
• If you have a large named area, it can be non-obvious (especially when zoomed in) what’s causing the name to appear.
• There’s useful shortcuts (like J) that don’t appear in the help.
• There’s lots of useful actions that don’t have any GUI for them, unless you count documenting the keypresses on the 8th tab of the Help menu!
• You can get to the situation where something hasn’t loaded - either the map, or in some cases map_features, and find yourself in a world of hurt, with no warning.
• One person couldn’t figure out panning the map around while editing. That’s a combination of no buttons, and that if you (tentatively) click on the background, something happens (start drawing a way), so you learn not to click on the background. Of course, to pan the map you need to mousedown to drag it.
• I’ve never seen anyone using the Potlatch 2 search button, but people often use the main search bar while editing. That often leads to pain when they click on the results.

One of the things that I want to work on within Potlatch 2 is to (mis)use the sidebar to provide context sensitive help. So I imagine when you’re drawing a way, a little square at the bottom of the sidebar says “You’re drawing a line. Double click to stop drawing, click on another way to create a junction” and so on. I think it’ll be especially useful for the first 10 minutes while people get to grips with things.

But, in saying all this, the feedback I get time and time again is how easy it is to get started with OSM, very rarely do I hear that participants found it hard. We can, however, make it even easier!

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This post was posted on 1 March 2012 and tagged OpenStreetMap