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fix responsive use of portals with cesium map views

Open mbjones opened this issue 2 years ago • 2 comments

The metacatui user interface overall and the cesium maps and data portals in particular need to be assessed and fixed to work on mobile devices and various lower resolution devices.

See also issue #1598

This was raised in the PDG Mini-workshop.

mbjones avatar Nov 29 '23 21:11 mbjones

Notes based on our recent PDG viz team discussion

There are two main parts to this improvement:

  1. Fixing navigation of the map itself on mobile
  2. Layout and structural changes for the map UI and portal
  • Navigation challenges on mobile are a longstanding issue with Cesium. The performance varies across different devices, with possible discrepancies between Android and iPhone experiences.
  • Proposed solutions include:
    • adding a notification recommending desktop usage for the best experience
    • emphasizing the viewfinder feature, which performs well on mobile
    • identify specific mobile use cases and consider which features might be pared down on smaller/touch screens
  • The current low mobile user engagement might stem from a subpar experience, a hypothesis that will be further explored with feedback during the upcoming PDG workshop.
  • The first step is to decide on a design

Details on the iOS experience

In a discussion about improving iOS mobile interactions with Cesium, it was found that holding one finger until a blue oval appears allows other gestures to function with practice. Challenges include inadvertent activation of copy/paste when fingers stray outside the map area or over widgets, and unintentional triggering of iOS's zoom/pan features which disrupt Cesium's gestures until reset. Suggestions included adding manual +/- controls or hints for starting gestures, as the current method is not very intuitive.

Note, we have an issue here about adding manual navigation buttons to Cesium as some users have expected to find those: https://github.com/NCEAS/metacatui/issues/2043

robyngit avatar Apr 17 '24 20:04 robyngit