I saw something: UI slow to update

[missinglink]

heya, I was trying to make an extract for New Zealand

I got a message from the UI which says the area you have defined is too large, that's fair enough because that specific geometry is super detailed and has many the MB.

next I started dragging the bounding box to make a smaller area but the UI didn't appear to refresh, it also wasn't clear if the the new box is still 'too large' (did it reconsider the updated bbox size?).

I double clicked a few times to zoom in and nothing happened, then I doubled clicked again and nothing happened so I spammed a few more clicks in there out of anger ;)

then after some time I stopped pushing buttons and the outline of New Zealand was rendered and then it started zooming in and eventually I ended up looking at the middle of the ocean somewhere.

after playing with it a bit I got the 'Aw, Snap!' message from google chrome crashing the tab :(

It looks like the UI is loading a huge amount of data and the network lag is causing a UI lag, this is compounding as users click more and it loads more...

this might be solvable by a couple things:

• an indicator showing when loading is happening (like a spinner), maybe lock the UI?
• loading simplified geometries more suitable for the browser

note: I have a 200Mbit connection at home so that shouldn't be an issue, the chrome inspector says it took 50.66s and 117Mb to get to the point where I could see the outline of New Zealand.

I recorder a .har file for you to have a look https://gist.github.com/missinglink/d16db351fe7f1e37434662adb276b9ec which you can drop in here http://www.softwareishard.com/har/viewer/ to have a look.

it looks great BTW, sorry for coming from a country with super detailed geometry data, I possibly picked the worst geometry to test against :)

Google Chrome Beta - Version 52.0.2743.24 beta (64-bit)
Ubuntu 15.10

[migurski]

Thanks Peter! Wonder if this is due to the complexity of NZ outline in GeoJSON.

[binx]

@missinglink thank you so much for writing this out! It's the best documentation I've ever seen on a UX problem. For what it's worth, the UI should be updating to reflect the size of the box that you were drawing, so once your request was < 5deg on the longest side, it should have given you an option to make a request.

@migurski we probably shouldn't show the geojson outlines of very large areas... I could do a check on the size of the requested area before pinging WOF for the outline. This would at least limit the wait for an outline to more reasonable areas.

I do think that the spinner, or some indication of loading is a good idea. I'll look into that :)

[migurski]

Another possibility, since we're proxying the WoF requests, is to simplify them on the way through to ensure they are appropriately-sized.