Tag Page Revamp - What should it contain?

[amilica]

Hello everyone!

So as you may know, the page that lists all the pages containing a certain tag looks a bit outdated and misses quite important contextual info about the pages.

Curent look (example)

Identified issues

1. Breadcrumb page title is confusing
2. Page title doesn’t go with the content of the page, it’s not clear
3. The tag at the beginning of the page is not cohesive with the current style of tags on a single page
4. Silk icons are used
5. The tag is repetead at the beginning of the page in different formats and, thus, together ocuppy too much space for no reason
6. The tag in Activity stream for pages tagged with knowledge base should maybe use the tag style
7. Activity stream is a secondary usecase to accessing a specific tag’s page, the first is viewing all the pages, thus searching. Activity stream ocuppies too much space for a secondary usecase. This wouldn’t be a problem if there were no other UI elements that needed to be included for a better experience, but we do need to include other elements, especially the ones that would fix the following 3 issues
8. The tag page is not cohesive with the search page
9. The pages listed have no context about them (date, author, summary, initial paragraph, etc.)
10. There is no filtering and sorting

Questions to answer

• Do you agree with the issues I’ve identified?
• Should the tag page have a lot of stuff from the advanced search page (ideally, revamped in a more esthetic way) or do you believe it doesn’t need the same level of detail?
• What things do you find necessary for the tag page to have?
• What things you don’t like about the Advanced Search page (example)?
• Should we revamp the Advanced Search Page (esthetics)?

[CharpentierLucas]

@amilica

Should the tag page have a lot of stuff from the advanced search page (ideally, revamped in a more esthetic way) or do you believe it doesn’t need the same level of detail?

I don’t know the subject very well, but when thinking about this, I wondered what would prevent us to just redirect the tag page to an advanced search page. After a quick look, I realised we’d be missing the activity stream, which can be important for some uses.

I’m not sure how all of it is implemented as of now, but I think reusing some of the advanced search UI could provide an ‘easy’ and consistent way to display pages tagged with.
Maybe we can just ‘replace’ the facet selector on the right with an activity stream and it’d work great.

@amilica

What things you don’t like about the Advanced Search page (example)?

In my opinion it’s already pretty good. If anything, a bit more consistency in the UI (text size, emphasis markers, separator sizes… especially noticeable in the search header).

@amilica

Should we revamp the Advanced Search Page (esthetics)?

It’s a pretty complex interface, and for the time being I think it’s pretty good, so I don’t think a revamp is worth it yet (there’d be so many parts to discuss ). In my opinion a small visual update should be enough.

Thanks!
Lucas C.

[mleduc]

@amilica

• The tag page is not cohesive with the search page
• The pages listed have no context about them (date, author, summary, initial paragraph, etc.)
• There is no filtering and sorting

I agree, but I don’t think we need as much detail as the advanced search page.
This page, as I see it, is here to see pages with a given tag.
So we should aim for providing tag related information and operations.
For instance:

• a tag cloud of other tags of the page tagged with the current tag
• add the ability to filter out using several tags (i.e., list of the pages with tag A and B)

In my experience, those two elements allow to narrow down the search to a small set of pages very efficiently.

We could keep the activity steam but for me this is a secondary element that should be displayed down in the page and not be the largest element of the top of the page.

Also (and I think we already have an issue for that), the list of pages should be paginated as otherwise the results does not scale if many pages are tagged with the same tag.

[amilica]

@CharpentierLucas

After a quick look, I realised we’d be missing the activity stream, which can be important for some uses.

Yep, yep.

With no facets (and more changes)

@CharpentierLucas

Maybe we can just ‘replace’ the facet selector on the right with an activity stream and it’d work great.

I tried out a layout thinking of this and it would look something like:

I took many elements from the advanced search page, without the facets and highlights. Changed a bit the wording of the sorting types and the position of the paging.

How I feel about the absence of facets and highlights: Highlights are not really needed when we are in the context of filtering by tags. Facets, on the other hand, could be very useful if a team tags a lot of pages in different subwikis and stuff.

I made the sections on the right collapsable. These sections are:

• Activity stream for pages tagged with [… ] - renamed Related activity stream to not repeat the tag for no reason. it’s pretty clear that the activity stream is stricly for the pages tagged with the tag he clicked on.
• Related tags - based on @mleduc 's idea, this would showcase other tags used alongside the one chosen by the user. Ideally they would be ordered by hoiw many uses they have (in how many pages they were used alongside the chosen one)
• Search by more tags - based on @mleduc 's idea, this would enable the user to add more tags to the search in an input field. When clicking a search button, he would get redirected to another tag page with all those tags.

With facets

@mleduc

We could keep the activity steam but for me this is a secondary element that should be displayed down in the page and not be the largest element of the top of the page.

If we want to keep the facets (which I think we should) and make activity stream a secondary usecase, we could do something like this:

I changed the look of the filtering in the right to lose the gray in the background (for a more lightweigt look) and the look of the tag (to allign with the tag look revamp proposal). In the facets, I’ve included the Related tags filter. Activity stream is now at the bottom of the right side and is collapsable.

@CharpentierLucas , @mleduc and everyone else who will stumble upon this post, let me know what you think about all of this when you have the time!

I will dwelve into how Related tags or Search by more tags would look and work if there is interest for these ideas.

[vmassol]

Some ideas/thoughts:

• We need an entry point to display all tags available in the Wiki. I can think of 2 possibilities:
  • Inside “Page Index”, as a “Tags” tab (similar to the “Attachments” tab).
  • In the drawer menu, with a “Tag Index” below “Page Index”
• I don’t think we need a tag cloud nor an activity stream for tags. A simple LD would be enough IMO. The reason is that we need consistency. Why would we have an activity stream for tags and not for, say, attachments or comments, or …
• Regarding the activity stream what we need is the ability to filter the existing activity streams (located in the Dashboard currently, and in the User profile page) and be able to filter the stream by apps, by xclass, etc. In the past we had some proposals for this, we need to check if we can find them in the design wiki or in some jira or in some email archives.
• The dashboard needs to be redesigned too as I don’t think we need Tags and Pages in there as we have entries for those elsewhere. Similarly we may want to have an “Activity stream”/“Recent Changes” entry in the drawer for displaying the general activity stream.
• Note: We can almost search for tags (but it’s not very easy to do), by searching for property.XWiki.TagClass.tags:* in the search UI. However, it lists documents, not tags. We would need a tag view if we want that use case.

[tkrieck]

Hey @amilica looking good on the proposal. I personally agree on all your points

My thoughts:

• Search documents by Tags, as the term implies, is a search first and foremost. So IMO using our current Search page would fit best this use case.
• However we can’t currently reduce the scope of the search beforehand, as far as I know we input some text and the search is performed on the content of pages. We can then refine it by using the options provided in the sidebar.
• It would be nice to be able to input some tokens before our intended search term, like “author: amilica or tag: knowledge”. Of course, to input these into the search field is an advanced feature, but we could provide some visual help cues on the possibilities. @vmassol replied that we can search for tags with property.XWiki.TagClass.tags:* on the search box. If we could shorten this syntax, I think we could achieve a nice result regarding advanced features and ease of use.
• Using AND/OR operators would be even better for power users.
• Regarding the advanced search, I think is a very functional page. I would change some minor things on the layout and also rework on some technical terms like “facets” but all in all I think it serves its purpose well.
• I don’t know the real usefulness of the activity stream on the tag page, so losing it would not be a problem for me at this location. It would be interesting to see some flow in which the user needs to use this feature while searching. I agree with @vmassol on filtering the activity stream on the dashboard and user profile.