An often overlooked and misunderstood feature in Earthdata Search is the timeline. This powerful feature allows users to quickly see the temporal extent of their granule search results as well as refine their temporal boundaries if they know how to use the timeline. That last part is key. The timeline consistently scores low during usability testing. However, once users are provided a demo of the timeline and what is possible, they are overwhelmingly excited about its functionality and pledge to start using it.
The scope of this work would be to improve the timeline usability as well as provide users a method to hide the timeline so that they may have more screen real estate for map and granule display.
The main benefit to this work would be improved usability of a powerful feature to allow for more accurate and relevant granule search results. In some cases users did not even know that the timeline could be leveraged to help them perform granule search.
The high level plan to work up a set of interactive wireframes that would show design updates to the timeline, how those updates improve usability, and how users can interact with the timeline within the application. Once those interactive wireframes are approved, we would be able to move forward with implementation of the additive workflow.