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Ibrahim Al-Syed
Practitioner ⭐️
Practitioner ⭐️
December 20, 2022
Implemented

CDF: User Experience Issues

Related products:Search UI
  • December 20, 2022
  • 20 replies
  • 444 views

We need the ability for CDF to function and support Domain Experts in a way that they can pull and visualize data without having to understand how data is connected or transformed in CDF. The UI needs to be seamless such as infield, it is intuitive there is nothing to be learnt or understood in that app. We need to seggregate Data Engineer view from Domain Expert.  Here are the list of issues:

As a domain SME or expert, I do not not need to know these things: Internal, External, Created time, updated time. I expect it to be current, latest and i want to view information. 

 

When i click Data Set, I see this mess. Is there not a better way to organize data sets that does not require naming convention and how things are getting organized. 

 

We should not need to see or understand all of the above. I see many different data sets from Bentley, many different PI etc. Is there a better way to organize and view this?

 

Why do I need to see Cognite Markups, annotations and also scans in events…can we not hide this from Domain SME?  see below….list of scans in events - its irrelevant for a domain expert to see this as an event. This is not really event, its just us uploading into CDF and its registered as an event. We need to seggregate such things and not making it visible. Data Engineering Events vs Real Plant Transaction in the faci

 

I am struggling with 3D modelling. see below its a mess. How do i navigate or get a landing page of the facility with 3D? or organize the files? or visualzie it similar to Remote or other apps. Why do i see zip files?

20 replies

gedi
Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
December 21, 2022

Thank you for your very well presented user experience issues, @ibrahim.alsyed

If you don’t mind I’d like to understand better your need to hide markups, annotations, scans in events from Domain SME, specifically:

  1. Should your mentioned items be hidden only from your Domain SMEs or everybody that has access to Fusion? 
    1. In case if some of your coworkers need to see that data, how do expect this should be administered? 
  2.  What are the definitions of these two types of events that you’ve concluded your paragraph with: “Data Engineering Events vs Real Plant Transaction in the faci”?
    1. Which of these events do you want to hide?
    2. How would you expect them to be hidden? 

This will be very beneficial for us to know as we’re planning the development of user preferences. In case if you’d like to answer your questions  over the call, please DM me.   

 

Many Thanks, 

On behalf of Cognite product team,
Gedi

gs
Terje Loken
Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Product Manager
December 21, 2022

On the topic of Data Sets, there will be substantial changes and improvements in how you organize data in CDF in 2023, which will also be reflect in the data exploration experience. For now, use of Data Sets requires some self-organization and naming conventions to make sense.

The same applies to 3D models - we are looking at ways to organize these better. But it seems you could also get some short-term gains with clearer naming conventions and maybe some cleanup?

On Events, the raw event list contains too much varied information. As you know, richer data modeling enables some of this to go away. In the meantime, you will need to use additional filters - selecting Events and filtering by type allows me to select workorders, notifications, etc.

Terje Loken
Anita Hæhre
Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Head of Community
December 21, 2022
NewGathering Interest
Anita Hæhre
Ibrahim Al-Syed
Practitioner ⭐️
Practitioner ⭐️
December 21, 2022

@gedi 

Answers to your questions:

  1. A Domain SME does not need to know when the data was created in CDF for example. We also need the ability to map all the data regardless of where and when it came into CDF. For examples, as an operations SME, I would like to see Alarms in XYZ Site. In order to understand this use case, we would have to go to Data Sets, have a good understanding of where these Alarms are coming from (i.e. which data source, and understand the naming convention) to get the results we want.  The other challenge we get into is that two different process units might have different Alarm Management Software (i.e. different data source). The SME should not care which source its coming form but rather just search Alarms and get consistent data without knowing naming convention. In Cognite Infield, Work orders, notifications, time series is clear, there is no hunting of data or figuring out which source its coming from as an example. I believe developer, data scientist and data engineer view should have this view but its needs to be layered with a DOMAIN SME View. We need to discuss this in a call.
  2.  In CDF today,  we should hide transactions and events that are happening as an event that are not real plant events not visible to Domain SME. For example, Cognite Markups, Annotations are being created to support Remote or Infield. This is not something Domain SME cares for in CDF. Another example would be someone uploading 3D Scan in CDF and an event is created for that; for a Domain SME - 3D Scan is not an event, but real plant transactions or data are events:
    1. Work Orders/Notifications
    2. Sample Lab Events
    3. Alarms
    4. etc
  3. I see Creation of SVG files to support Infield in CDF for Live interaction, and now that should be hidden too because Domain SME just ones to see one File not duplicates.

 

I hope this clarifies somewhat. I really do not want CDF to be a messy data lake but a usable product for people to find and search data in the most meaningful way. 

 

@terjelo i think we should setup a call on UI/UX in the new year to address and discuss challenges.

Philippe  Bettler
Practitioner ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Practitioner ⭐️⭐️⭐️
December 22, 2022

@terjelo, @ibrahim.alsyed  clean up is in progress and will help, as the names will follow the existing naming conventions. 

A few ideas:

One quick win could be to sort the dataset drop down.

On the 3D model, we could potentially gain from having a similar layout to the other resource types - e.g. Asset with filters.

Looking forward to improving the experience in 2023.

 

hescalona
Practitioner ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Practitioner ⭐️⭐️⭐️
December 27, 2022

@ibrahim.alsyed those are excellent points. As more data comes into the project, it will be increasingly difficult for an SME to find something relevant using the UI.

It seems the project could benefit with additional metadata (e.g. labels) and naming convention, as others have pointed out. Having the capability of putting all together into the same place does not removes the need of data engineering and management.

In addition to the ideas above, perhaps applying some out-of-the-box unsupervised clustering of objects of the same type (in the absence of metadata) could help sort/group things.

My 2 cents.

Hector Escalona
Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
January 18, 2023

To include hiding source files from domain experts  - those that are not mean to be viewed/explored via CDF e.g. point clouds 

cc: @Philippe Bettler  @rsiddha 

Ibrahim Al-Syed
Practitioner ⭐️
Practitioner ⭐️
January 18, 2023

continues to be a challenge.

Andreea Oprea
Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Expert ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
January 19, 2023

Hi Ibrahim,

 

All the points are excellent and part of our roadmap during this year. Thank you for sharing the details and context. 
A few solutions on the above items, that are coming soon, in the next releases (February and April) are: 

  • Annotations will be removed and not visible anymore under Events. For scans we will need to find another solution. 
  • Sorting based on frequency and alphabetically in the filtering menu, including for the dataset filter. 
  • Organizing the 3D page


We are looking into a series of improvements of the filtering menu, would be great to detail them together and get more insights into what would be relevant to have here.

​​​​​​​Thank you,

Andreea. 

Ibrahim Al-Syed
Practitioner ⭐️
Practitioner ⭐️
April 4, 2023

@Andreea Pastinaru whats the status of the items mentioned in the your post?