UI Changes for Tagging

Written by glenn mcdonald Monday, 14 March 2011 15:54

This week's system update (Tue 3/15) includes some changes to Needle's user interface for tagging websites.

The four buttons for training Needle to navigate through websites have all been reworded:

• The old (details link) button is now link to follow. This is the almost-all-purpose function for telling Needle to click on a link or other navigation element on a page. You should use this for everything except the three special cases on the three other buttons.
• The old (next-page link) button is now link to next page of paged results. The only thing you should use this for is telling Needle to page through paged results. E.g., if you get 8 pages of results back from a search form, on page 1 you should tag the link to page 2 (the "2" or "next" or whatever), on page 2 you should tag the link to page 3 (the "3" or "next" or whatever), etc.
• The old (fill-in field) button is now form input or control. Use this for telling Needle to fill in a text box, check a checkbox, select a radio button or pick from a drop-down list.
• The old (form button) is now form submit button. Use this only for telling Needle which button to click to actually send a form (with or without corresponding input from form input or control).

And they're now in that order ("fill-in field" used to be at the top, for reasons nobody here remembers).

Old		New

The groups of pages representing Needle's navigation through your site have also been renamed. These used to be called "start page", "results page", "results subpage", "results subsubpage", and some other obscure variations. We've simplified this scheme to just use numbers. The page you start on will now be "Page Group 1", the pages you get to from there will be "Page Group 2", the pages you get to from page group 2 will be "Page Group 3", etc.

Hopefully these wording tweaks will help make the functions a little clearer, especially for new users of the system. If you've already internalized the old names, give yourself a couple days to get used to the new ones, and then let us know if you have thoughts about them!

We also made one small change to the way the tagging panel operates. Needle can show you your tags in two different ways: as a tree of all the available tags and their interconnections, or as a flat list of just the tags you're actually using on a particular group of pages. On the first page of a new group, we automatically show the tree, so you can pick what tags you want to apply, and on the second and subsequent pages we automatically switch to the list of applied tags, in the correct order, so you can focus on tagging new example pages.

In addition to this automatic switch, there are now links that allow you to switch back and forth between the two modes yourself. If you're on the third or fourth page, and realize you need to add some tags that weren't on the first two, for example, click the gray show all link next to the "Tags in use" heading and you'll switch back to the full tree. To get back to the streamlined list after you've added the new tags, click the gray hide unused tags next to the "Tag data" heading.

Here's how everything looks now, with all these changes:

Tag Tree		Tag List

As always, if you have feedback or questions about usability, features or anything else, let us know, either in the forum (click the "forum" link at the top of any Needle data page) or by sending us a support message (click the "support" link, right next to "forum").

We're always working on the system, and updates are rolled out most Tuesday mornings. Changes that affect how you use the software will generally get mentioned here on the blog and Twitter (@needlebase), but if you're interested in more details about less prominent changes, follow our Release Notes blog.