User Testing

Here's a new site feature I've been working on non-stop for the last few days and could use some feedback. I'm starting to think the length of it is completely excessive but take a look and and let me know what you think. Thanks.

[bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Test


Kevin

... although not *completely* sure what drives the actual structure ...

...But a tad unwieldy.

Isn't the extended family tree of a band "every other band on the site" by definition?

I suppose by "extended" you mean "within five hops" or something like that. I think "within two hops" or maybe three at most would be much more useful. If you care what some of those other bands link to, go look at THEIR family trees. THat would cut down on the length and increase readability. As it is there's so much info there I just can't pull anything useful out of it at all.

OK, I see you reduced it to two hops, and it is indeed much more readable.

Next immediate thing is that all the band names in the tree need to be links to those bands' pages.

The next thing that would be nice is to see a visual indication of which of the second-level bands themselves link to further groups. For example, you could put "- ..." after all the second-level bands which link to other groups besides the one which you can see.

Finally, the ultimate graphy-theory problem here is what to do with non-tree-shaped (i.e. cyclic) graphs. For example, band A links to B and C, which both link to D. Does D show up twice in your second-level tree? Or once, but only on one of B or C? The correct way is obviously to draw a connection from both B and C to the entry for D, but if things can be arbitrarily complex, it's not clear how to handle this in a graphically nice way (what if B and C also both link to E? Or what if A links to D as well?).

I have this weird sort of vision in my head of a 3-D, first-person view of the band tree, where you're standing in one band node, and you can traverse links to any connected band. Doing a traverse between distantly joined bands means you get this flythough along multiple connections, whizzing past each band. Not only is it not clear how to actually do this, such a view would be totally useless. But it probably comes closest (in a visual sense, at least) to me comments in an email awhile back about "a mix of musicplasma.com and bandtoband.com".

Actually (I'm thinking out loud here, or whatever the typing equivalent is), now that I think about it, if you just graphed (a la musicplasma) a band and the tree within two connections (like you do in your test page, but graphically with arbitrary angles for the edges instead of tabular-looking text data), and you let users click on any band to slide over and recenter on that band (and then redraw the graph), THAT would be quite cool. And doable in flash.

I've taken down the test page for now as I'm trying to integrate it in with a particular band's page. I've run into a number of performance issues on the server side that I've had to bury a number of hours in trying to resolve which is why this is taking so long. I've started tweaking with the number of nodes that appear in the tree so as too keep things down to a reasonable level. Those bands with few connections will have a deeper tree while those with a ton of close connections will have a shallow tree which will hopefully keep the number of bands appearing in each tree relatively equal (although there will be some big swings in certain cases).

The band names will of course be clickable, just something I have to incorporate. As for cyclic graphs, there is no good way to handle that on a 2D surface in HTML so what I've done is limit any band name to appearing once as it appears in the tree. The tree itself is constructed in depth stages (all links 2 steps away are mined before links 3 steps away) so a band will always appear in the tree in the shortest amount of steps and never again in any sub branch. This elimiates the possiblily of strange cylical occurances if the band were to appear again on a sub branch however there is the trade-off of not properly showing all the inter-relationships within the tree. As I've said there is no good way to handle that on a 2D surface.

I agree with you that it can be done in 3D. I've researched a number of java implementations of biological / evolutionary trees which do the 3D traversing you describe here and are quite interesting however at this stage of the game I'm going to finish the implemenation of the 2D graph acknowledging its limitations but at least have a working version at this stage to put online. Once I get through this, and the mountain of other things on my To Do list, I'll probably go back a do some more research on more graphical implementations of the concept.


Kevin