On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:

[Cross-posting to WLM mailing list]

Hi Phil & mobile team,

a few questions/comments from playing with the WLM app.

1) Filenames of uploaded files

Right now files appear to follow the following pattern:

[Name of monument] (taken on [timestamp in DDMMMYYYY HHhrsMMminsSSsecs]).jpeg

First question: Is there a reason we're using ".jpeg" instead of the
more common ".jpg" extension?

This is a good question and I'm not sure why this is happening. It's potentially a default of the Cordova library we use. Someone more informed might be able to shed light on this.

Second question: What are the motivations for the full timestamp in
the pattern? Is it primarily uniqueness? If so I would suggest
(re-)considering other approaches to achieve uniqueness (e.g.
obtaining a unique suffix like 001, 002). This pattern seems pretty
verbose; I do see some files with date-stamps in the name on Commons
(and it's encouraged per
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_naming ), but very few
that have the full timestamp.

This is primarily about trying to get a good balance between uniqueness and being human readable. There was a confusing ticket about this - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38285 which I closed today due to the fact it wasn't actionable - I welcome (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38285#c8) suggestions on how we could improve the names.

* The red place-marks vs. gray place-marks iconography - are we
explaining this anywhere in the UI? I was ultimately able to infer it,
but it might be nice to have this explained e.g. by having the icon
repeated in the detail view with a "Existing image" or "Photograph
needed" label.

Yes I agree we could reinforce this better...

* In list view, the gray boxes are gradually replaced with photographs
where they exist. Ultimately I end up with some remaining gray boxes,
which I can infer are cases where a photo is missing. But it seems
like we want to have a different icon in list view for "We don't have
a photo at all" vs. "We're still checking whether we have a photo".
Perhaps a spinner while it's checking?

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38936 :-)

3) Small UX confusion

* I have been repeatedly confused by the proximity of the "Back" arrow
to the "Map view / List view" selector. They look like they're a
single widget. I would suggest moving the "Map view" vs. "List view"
indicator to the right, detaching it from the "Back" arrow.

We've had similar comments from Matthew Roth so agree this should be thought about.