Explore page

[Grizzly127]

here is a new design for the explore page (in combination with the new navbar #27 and the object display #26 (here we can decide better if pink/orange or blue is better)

Explanation:
Now you can filter the objects on the left side: Categories, Media Types and Options
on the top you can search for a specific object or collection, you can look at your history and you can sort the objects by name, popularity, etc.

I think here is a good place for the buttons to add a new object or collection (maybe also in the user profile where you can see your objects and collections), so I would remove it from the navigation bar.

@HeyItsBATMAN @ZetOE @lozanaross

[lozanaross]

@Grizzly127 - there is a lot of good stuff going on here (I really like the sidebar for all the filtering actions!). But I think it might be easier to have a meeting to go over the details and then chunk up this issue into smaller ones. Afterwards, I would advise to not show both Kompakkt & Semantic Kompakkt solutions in Github going forward, because here we should only be discussing the Kompakkt solutions & then in Gitlab we should have the Semantic Kompakkt solutions, that way we keep the actions for the dev team more clearly defined, but we have the Figma files as source of truth for both teams.

[Grizzly127]

here is the latest version of the Explore page:

• I added the new Navbar (with history button)
• we removed the icons, now there is only the information about what kind of object it is
• new shadow to the object cards
• new blue line between object and object title

[lozanaross]

@Grizzly127 - sorry I didn't have a chance to review yesterday.

I think this is already making great progress in terms of visual style, but I suggest we park it for now until we complete the higher priority edits on the Nav & Action toolbars, the Upload process, etc. Would be great to comeback to this in the spring when you're back with the team.

I think we still need to address parts of my comments here: #26 (comment) - such as where to add the additional icons (not just remove them). The object "badges" look great, but we still need to think (& test with users) what other actions on top of the object cards would be useful.

I also think the 'Options' - Annotable (not an English word) or Annotated, etc. - that are on the side are still not really clear. I think we need to do some more work there on identifying what types of filtering options users can really benefit from. The design is a lot better, but we now need to think on functionality for users.

[HeyItsBATMAN]

I also think the 'Options' - Annotable (not an English word) or Annotated, etc. - that are on the side are still not really clear. I think we need to do some more work there on identifying what types of filtering options users can really benefit from.

Heavily agree. The names of the filter options are too technical and probably do not make sense for users not associated with Kompakkt internals.

Just for reference, so we can talk about possible changes to options, here is what they mean:

Option	Meaning
Annotatable	Entities the user is allowed to annotate
Annotated	Entities that have been annotated
Restricted	Entities that are not public, but where the user has access
Associated	Entities where the user is mentioned in the metadata (using text-search)

---

I could imagine that splitting the options into groups would allow users to make more informed choices. As an example (imagine these as dropdown menus, radio buttons, or a similar input type where only one of the options can be chosen):

Category:

• Any
• Objects
• Collections

Media type:

• Any
• 3D Model
• Image
• Audio
• Video

Annotations:

• With or without annotations
• Only with annotations
• Only without annotations

(with an additional checkbox?)

• Only show entities I am allowed to annotate

Access (these are separated on purpose):

• Public entities
• Private entities

---

This is just an idea though

[Grizzly127]

current Explore page

We worked a lot on the explore page by working on the institutional page.
This is the current Explore page:

This are the current filter options:

What about this filter options we talked about before?

(with an additional checkbox?)
Only show entities I am allowed to annotate

Access (these are separated on purpose):
Public entities
Private entities

If we introduce the downloadability of objects, we also need the option to filter for downloadable objects, right? Maybe that belongs to the Access filter options then?

One more question:
What do you think about adding the number of available objects here?
Or does it make everything complicated? Or can we add the number of available objects for whatever filter options were chosen somewhere else?

Here we are also waiting on the feedback from our first "user survey", where we showed the page to some users.

@lozanaross

[lozanaross]

@Grizzly127 a lot of good questions!

I'll try to list my comments below in order:

1. Default state & consistency - what is actually the default state once a user opens the Explore page for the first time? We have inconsistency in how we show the filter / sorting options. In some cases, we have some options pre-selected, in other cases we are asking the user to select something. Also we don't use the word "Select" consistently, maybe we should?

Sort by > [Popularity] - There is already a default option chosen here, we don't have a selection description, like we have in "Select media types" for instance. Should we keep it like this, or come up with a description, like "Select display order" ?

Filter by > [Select objects or collections] - Here we should maybe include 'Select' for consistency and we could also include institutions as an option? So dropdown shows:

• Objects
• Collections
• Institutions

Media types > [Select media types] - this is fine as is

Annotation options > [Select annotation options] - Use Select instead of Choose for consistency. I don't think we should add an extra option here, items i can annotate will be visible from my profile page anyway, and it's a bit complicated to explain to users via a single dropdown what's the difference between "Open for annotation" and "Open only to me" - technically everything can be annotated, just depends how it's viewed in the end - i.e. within a collection, or not.

Access options > [Select access options] - This is also a bit tricky, what's Private? Private objects are managed better via the profile page. I do think there is a need to filter by license maybe and downloadability. So maybe on Explore we show only public objects anyway, but allow users to filter by License types & downloadability:

• Copyrighted
• Openly licensed (CC)
• Openly licensed and downloadable

(NB: under Open License we can combine all CC license variations)

2. Object counting - this is a good idea, but I think we shouldn't include in the sidebar with filters as that may get confusing - how about we count it below where we have:

Items per page: 30 | 1 - 30 of infinity < >

Infinity should actually be a number, so "1 - 30 of 175"; and if the number is under 30, it should be "1-15 of 15" (for example), I think that would be simplest, so we only estimate one number for all filters that are applied.

[Grizzly127]

Default state & consistency - what is actually the default state once a user opens the Explore page for the first time? We have inconsistency in how we show the filter / sorting options. In some cases, we have some options pre-selected, in other cases we are asking the user to select something. Also we don't use the word "Select" consistently, maybe we should?

The default stat is no filter options are pre-selected. I just displayed them sometimes to have a demonstration about how it looks like, if filters are selected.
The sorting filter could be pre-selected to "Popularity" for example. In other pages like sketchfab or any other page (shopping, etc.) a pre-sorting option is always selected. And mostly it's the "most popular", "Bestseller" option per default.
Yes, we should use "select" consistently!

Filter by > [Select objects or collections] - Here we should maybe include 'Select' for consistency and we could also include institutions as an option?

I think this is a good place to include institutions, but maybe we can find another title for it? Because with "Select objects or collections" it's not clear, that you can also filter for institutions here.
Maybe it's "Select category"?
Does the search bar still say "Search in objects and collections" then?

2. Object counting

That's a very good solution, thank you!

@lozanaross

[lozanaross]

The default stat is no filter options are pre-selected. I just displayed them sometimes to have a demonstration about how it looks like, if filters are selected. The sorting filter could be pre-selected to "Popularity" for example. In other pages like sketchfab or any other page (shopping, etc.) a pre-sorting option is always selected. And mostly it's the "most popular", "Bestseller" option per default.

@Grizzly127 OK, then let's keep it so, indeed sorting is different operation from filtering, so probably fine to be treating it differently with regards to default values.

I think this is a good place to include institutions, but maybe we can find another title for it? Because with "Select objects or collections" it's not clear, that you can also filter for institutions here. Maybe it's "Select category"? Does the search bar still say "Search in objects and collections" then?

I think it's fine if we consider institutions to be just a form of collecting, to make it extra clear we could also have the options like so:

• Objects
• User collections
• Institutional collections

I think it's better to keep the title "Filter by" because it's more clear than "Category", first we have sorting and below it we have filters. Also the filter options could change depending on what users select in terms of objects vs collections. For example, collections maybe don't need annotation and access options, because these only work on the object level, not the collection level, or am i wrong @ZetOE? In such cases, we could grey out these options if users filter only for collections.

I think it's fine to keep the Search bar as it is because again it makes it more clear that we're searching through both types of content.

[Grizzly127]

I added "Category" as the title for the "Objects and Collections" filter option, because all other filters have an extra title as well, and "filter by" is the title for all filter options. Theoretically we need both here:

I think it looks a bit weird like this. That's why I removed the "Filter by" title and just kept the title for the particular filter options.
Do you have another idea here? @lozanaross