Multimedia:Meetings/2010/04/29

Upload Wizard

Present

Naoko Komura, Guillaume Paumier, Neil Kandalgaonkar

Splitting up licensing and upload details

NeilK argued that the current licensing interface is too complicated. He argued that licensing should not be combined with all the other information, nor should there be licensing "overrides" where some uploads on the page use the deed chooser at the top of the page, and others are set individually. Demonstrated current interface which implements desired behaviour and argued was too complicated. NeilK suggested another interface where licensing is optionally set for all uploads in a separate step.

This also means that the anticipated "Incomplete Uploads" page would not be exactly identical to step 2 of the Upload Wizard, but NeilK & Guillaume have worked out an alternative batch interface (just mockups so far).

With demos, argument accepted tentatively by Naoko & Guillaume, but everyone would like to see the 4 step process ASAP before we do anything else to see if our intuitions are correct. NeilK estimates this will take 1-2 days.

Validation and Help

All agree the form needs some help or other examples, as well as corrective messages when the user does incorrect input.

For the most part, we prevent the user from even being able to input anything incorrectly, but for the cases where we do, we will use the following principles:

Tooltips and errors take the form of a floating "post-it note" with a small triangle sticking out of one edge, pointing at the field in question. Tooltips will be a neutral color, errors will be reddish.
When a field has focus, show a tooltip with an example or other helpful information about how to fill out the form. (Deferred: It should be possible for expert users to indicate that they don't want to see these any more.)
When content can be analyzed for errors, give instant or near-instant feedback upon entering data (such as the filename field, which automatically checks for uniqueness)
If field is blank, give error feedback upon the user trying to submit, with a similar tooltip
When an error is caught, outline the field in red and show an error "post-it". Do not wait for user to give the field focus to show this. If the "post-it" is longer than one line, show some interface widget to expand it (do not allow these error post-its to "overlap"). These messages should be brief. If we want to get discursive, we may also include a button in the tooltip to pop up a modal dialog to explain further.
If errors are not caught somehow before submission, be ready to populate the form with errors detected server-side.

What needs tooltip help?

Title
Description
Source
Author
License (?)
Date (explain that it should be date photo was taken, picture painted, etc.)
Location
Categories
Other information

What kinds of error messages might occur?

Title too short
Title too long (or truncated)
Title is not acceptable (common autogenerated filename, not descriptive -- viz. feature on Commons today)
Title is already taken by another filename (show interface similar to Add Media Wizard; thumbnail with option to overwrite that image).

n.b. we will always allow uploading of an image, even if it has a title which is the same as another. Currently accomplished by secretly uploading the file with an autogenerated filename, then changing the name to the desired one later on in the wizard; this approach may not be suitable for final version of app

Need at least one description, of a reasonable length
Description too short
Description too long (or truncated)
Date in improper format
Other information... ?? bad wikitext?
Source too short
Source too long (or truncated)
?? Source bad URL (if appears to be an inaccessible or broken URL?)
Author too short
Author too long (or truncated)
Failed to select license
Signature too short
Signature too long
... probably others

Guillaume suggested that the title could sometimes be derived from description, but no one could agree on the semantics of when this would occur, so the idea was shelved for now.

Category Widget

Nice to have. This is already available in AMW.

Next steps

NeilK

get a four-step process working (ASAP, by Tuesday)
work on remaining TODOs in Multimedia Wizard tech notes, such as links from the thank you page, other layout issues
work on other features discussed above: validation, help tooltips