Issue 18021
There is an increasing number of users that have trouble navigating the portal features
18021
Reporter: jlegind
Type: Improvement
Summary: There is an increasing number of users that have trouble navigating the portal features
Priority: Major
Resolution: WontFix
Status: Closed
Created: 2015-11-06 16:01:47.791
Updated: 2017-10-10 11:17:26.383
Resolved: 2017-10-10 11:17:26.36
Description: I see that users (students/researchers) requesting help with the portal is on the increase. This should be addressed in future portal development.
Case 1.
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I am a graduate student at Humboldt State University. I am trying to map American Bullfrog occurrences in California, I downloaded Bullfrog records from gbif and attempted to import them into ArcMap. The format of the csv is very strange. There are no columns for the coordinates, all the information seems to be lumped into 2 or 3 columns. I have attached the csv and the link to my search here. The file below is the only file contained in the zipfile.
{quote}
...
Case 2. Reply to user:
{quote}
The species Inula viscosa (L.) Aiton is a synonym of the accepted name Dittrichia viscosa (L.) Greuter http://www.gbif.org/species/3101184
You can download the records from the link posted, but if you are interested in records above a certain elevation you should use the 'filter' function and choose 'Elevation'. Any associated organisms with the plant can be searched for in the same way.
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Author: rdmpage
Created: 2015-11-07 10:50:15.153
Updated: 2015-11-07 10:50:15.153
Hi Jan,
I guess it would be helpful to have more of these, and maybe as JIRA issues so they can be investigated further. For example, I tried to reproduce the problem with bullfrogs. I grabbed some data http://doi.org/10.15468/dl.ipxj52 and opened the CSV file in arcgis.com http://arcg.is/1kgDSjF without any problems. I wonder if there's a software issue, for example the download file name ends in ".csv" but it's actually tab-delimited (hence ".tsv" might be more appropriate), so maybe the user's software was looking for commas to delimited columns, not tabs.
I'm sure there is scope for detailed usability studies. I get the sense that people used to tools like ArcGIS can sometimes struggle with GBIF, my limited interaction with GIS people suggests they think in terms of layers and more processed data than GBIF typically provides.
How many of these usability issues do you encounter? When you say it's increasing, what sort of numbers are involved?
Rod