Direction for search results

Yep! Those are my thoughts for architecture.

Ahhh yea I should have explained: I'm assuming crops will have more info to display than that. If not we can come up with a different design or like you said show some related crops, maybe even seed ads, etc.

I don't have a particular tool for sharing designs in mind, besides cl.ly :P Do you know any good ones?

Looking good visually. Having some way to collaboratively annotate these screenshots would be super useful.

I think the left-right split on Crop Page.png isn't ideal. Sure, the user doesn't have that initial scroll hit to get past the crop info and down to additional search results, but once a user does scroll, there's now a big portion of the screen permanently taken up by crop info (assuming the crop info is position:fixed) making that process less efficient.

I guess it comes down to our assumption about compatibility. The screenshots demonstrate a couple of highly compatible entries quickly giving way to low compatibility.
I imagine, especially for a crop like Tomatoes, that if the user has high compatibility with one guide for outdoor grown Tomatoes, then a lot of the other Tomato guides are going to have high compatibility.
That assumption shifts the emphasis from "the user only needs to see the top few" to "the user needs to be able to efficiently hunt through the guides to find the one that interests them".

On a functional level, I think these screens fail to deliver enough information. I think they over emphasize the importance of a compatibility score and an author-composed title and description.

I think we need to let the user know why their compatibility score is high or low. Otherwise if I have 5 fairly equally compatible entries for heirloom tomatoes, how do I choose without laboriously navigating to each one in turn?
Maybe some key ticks and crosses? Like a pro's and con's list:

✓ Organic
✓ Indeterminate / Vine type
⨯ Clay soil

I also think that basing the ordering solely on the compatibility score could we a mistake. We should factor in how popular the guide is, how many people favourite it, how many people comment it, etc. Moreover, I think we should expose this information to the user.
All this information is crucial to deciding which guides are worth my time investigating.
The compatibility score might be low because my prerequisites are not a match, but if it's a really well written popular article with lots of comments, it could still an awful lot more valuable to me than a poorly written article with a high compatibility rating.

It could be argued that this kind of information is clutter, but I would argue that on a search results page you need to present the user with as much information as possible to help them make sense of a potentially confusing array of options.

I'm also not sure I see a benefit to grouping search results by crop in 'Search Results.png'. I think showing matching crops in order to filter down to display only that crop is useful, but why separate compatible guides by crop on the right?

If the user doesn't know or care what variety of Tomato they want to grow then all this is doing is increasing the number of incompatible articles in the valuable above-the-fold spot. If they do care, then the crop navigation to the left provides them with the functionality they need.

All good points. I had a similar concern on the crop page being split, but thought most users trying to get to a good guide from this page would benefit from having a bit of crop info and a full list of guides. We could split these off though.

We can always show more guides per crop, the question is do most people care what the variety is? Are users coming with a variety of tomatoes in mind? Do they not know a variety and are trying to find one? Or do they simply not care? Catering to all of these makes choosing a definite direction in the design hard.

I completely agree on showing why a guide is "compatible", but think we could put it in a popover for the score to avoid having repeated icons and stats everywhere, not overwhelm less experienced gardeners, and still provide the information. What do you think?

To me, as problematic as it can be, I think the author title/description, and compatibility scores can be valuable, more so than stats. Where quantified information gives the user everything, an more qualitative title and description can provide a wealth of more human-friendly information and the compatibility score attempts to interpret otherwise potentially meaningless stats into something more meaningful. That said I have my concerns about resting everything on the score and agree that we should show some of popularity/comments/use metrics somehow.

Good point about popular guides with low compatibility.

I think this kind of information does very quickly become clutter, and it's up to us to help the user make a choice without lazily throwing up guide and crop metrics. Things like the compatibility score are heading in this direction, despite not being perfect!

I don't think there's any reason not to group by crop. That's one of my biggest gripes with the current design. I do think the different sections could take up less space though, and can play with that if you think that'd help?

So TL;DR: I like author info, would like to try guide metrics in popovers, we should show guide comments/favorites, crop page should not be in search, and we might need to rethink sorting by crop variety.

(Loomio needs a way to thread conversations out into mini-discussions! This is getting overwhelming, want to try Influence?)

Thanks for the markdown loomio ¬_¬
(Apparently it's opt-in (that little grey 'A') and can't be turned on after the fact lol)

Sure, I was going to recommend invision. Whichever you choose, you should be able to upload an image and we can comment on them.

Hey look at that! Some of my friends are on the homepage :) Sounds like a good choice :P

Hey all, sorry for chiming in so late on this (was fulfilling Kickstarter rewards and then travelled to Spain and got massively jet-lagged/internetless)

I always like putting stuff in context: Ryan and I came to the split screen idea from Airbnb's search results page: https://www.airbnb.com/s/san-francisco?source=bb In their page, the map on the left is in a way the most important "filter" - location. And on the right are all the results with extra filters.

For us, arguably the most important (or at least, fun) filter is to choose a Crop, but this really depends on how one is using the site.

The reason for grouping results by crop was to provide context for each Guide. Looking at the original mockups I had made, there wasn't an easy indication what Crop each Guide was written for other than being in the title.

I'm still on the fence about the grouped results. I like the context the grouping provides, but I worry about there being a really great Guide that would normally be #1 in results, but it is written for the 20th crop in the list, therefor I never see it. Perhaps the right side of the screen could have two views that can be toggled by the user: Grouped results and straight list view?

Hmmm... ok, now I am leaning towards the list view rather than grouped results. I imagine two users: 1) User knows what Crop they want, they choose it and go straight to the list view - no groupings 2) User does not know which crop they want and wants to see all Guide results for all the crops. They probably want to see the top results across the board based on compatibility, popularity, etc, rather than having to scroll through groupings.

The list view has to be built for the MVP (I suppose it already is to some extent, there is just no ranking), so how about we focus on just that for now and use it on both single crop and multi-crop pages? The grouped view for multi-crop pages could be an A/B test down the line, or a toggle-able option. What do ya'll think?

Regarding search ranking:
I agree that we do not want to overwhelm the user, we want to provide valuable information that will help them make a decision as to which Guides to open, and we want to avoid throwing meaningless metrics at them in favor of something easier to digest. I think we all agree the compatibility score is a good idea, though it is not the end-all solution. I proposed on GitHub that in addition to this, we provide a unified "popularity score" based on pageviews, comments, etc https://github.com/FarmBot/OpenFarm/issues/195 and also a Guide completeness score https://github.com/FarmBot/OpenFarm/issues/194. I also think that a general rating of quality is a good idea. Originally I had thought a 5-star rating would do, but this seems to be a bad choice. Perhaps a better choice is only allowing users to "like" the guide by giving it a "green thumbs up"? Users could then feasibly look at all of the guides they have liked/favorited via their profile.

We could also show a badge of some sort for Guides that are popular, have a lot of forum activity, or are new. I like this option because it draws the eyes to the Guides that are highlighted with badges rather than showing a zillion icons and numbers that the user must actually interpret for each guide.

I like the idea of a tooltip over the compatibility score displaying the ticks and crosses you mentioned @andruvallance.

I agree Guide filters are going to be important and we'll want to make them easily usable. I love the sowing time (now) idea!

PS, this narrow column blows!

Hahaha I was thinking the same thing on the column! (another argument to maybe not have fixed crop info?)

Thanks for providing some context Rory. I should have explained the conception of the idea more. With the Airbnb example, all the of amenities of a listing are crucial to look at and evaluate a place on (in a high-level, initial search), but of course location is king; in this example the user moves the map, re-evaluates the results and either chooses one, more moves the map again. We thought something similar would work well for the crops, with the user choosing a crop, seeing detailed crop info on the left, and evaluating the guides on the right, or going back to see all results and choose another crop.

What do you all think of reducing the limit on guide results per crop and either keeping them organized by "crop titles" or interleaving them and labeling the guides with the crop they're made for? (this later option takes up more space with repeated text and takes away a level of organization, but does allow for sorting based on some measurement regardless of crop type. I'll work on some mock-ups in the meantime.

Still not sure what's best to show as far as ratings and stuff… I think letting users bookmark guides is great, and it's really helpful to double up the feature as a vote (like, thumbs up, etc). Maybe comment counts aren't that helpful initially and we just show hearts (or whatever else) and compatibility for now (with some details for compatibility on hover)?

Off-topic: Install Stylebot Chrome Extension and use this css to make everything full width :P Only the teensiest bit jank.