On September 20th, we released a brand new editor to improve the experience of users creating and maintaining metadata.
On the surface, we’ve taken great effort to make sure the best parts of our editor remained the same, while making a few adjustments to improve the metadata editing experience. Underneath however, there has been a year-long process to completely reengineer how the editor is built to make it easier for us to add more dynamic functionality to the Aristotle Metadata Registry. These behind the scenes changes have allowed us to reduced the time to load and save large metadata items.
The biggest improvements to the editor in this first release are:
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A new “as-you-type” metadata checker, that shows users if similar metadata already exists in the registry.
The new editor now shows recommendations for existing metadata as you are typing to reduce the duplication of content in the registry. It also removes a step in the creation process by bringing together the find and create steps into a single view.
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Improved usability when creating subitems - such as when linking Data Elements to Distributions, Data Set Specifications or Indicators.
One of the most consistent pieces of feedback we’ve gotten is around making it easier to edit datasets & distributions with large numbers of items. We’ve designed a new component editor that splits ordering and editor to make it easier to see and reorder data definitions.
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Improved user flows when removing components.
Users will now have clear visual indicators when removing links and components from metadata. This change also allows users to recover incorrectly deleted items before saving.
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Continue making changes after saving.
Lastly, users will be able to make intermittent saves and continue editing, to ensure that large changes can be incrementally saved to prevent editors from losing their work. We’re also using this same workflow to explore how to store unsaved changes to help users recover work if they accidentally close their browser.
We look forward to using the newly designed editor to slowly add more enhancements to the Aristotle Metadata Registry as part of our mission to make metadata management easy and accessible for all users. So look our for announcements as we continue to enhance the product over the months to come!
We hope you enjoy this new editor, and if you have feedback on this new editor let us know below.