Collection management in 2.0

Feedback
1

I do like the new view we get of top-level collections only (collections within collections are not visible in the top-level view). I think this makes managing documents in team workspaces with lots of members / notebooks easier. I think it also encourages people to take more care in curating their notebooks, especially in a team workspace environment.

That said, some feedback / requests to ease this process:

  • For inducting people (students in my case) into Observable, I would like to encourage people to organise their documents in collections from the outset. This currently requires moving to old.observablehq in order to ‘…’ → ‘Add to collection’. If there’s a chance this can be added to the 2.0 interface soon, that would remove the requirement to explain old.observable in the first 30 minutes of induction.

  • The 2x2 display of notebook thumbnails as the collection image is an improvement over the old 1.0 where a single arbitrary notebook was shown (leading to confusion as to whether this was a collection or notebook). However, this can lead to a rather busy collection screen as collections build up, making quick collection searching more difficult. Compare the old and new views below. Would it be possible to set the display to the single collection thumbnail image if present, while defaulting to the 2x2 mosaic if not?

  • Would be nice to allow (persistent) selection of collection ordering (title, last edited notebook in collection; last viewed etc.). As collections grow, this becomes increasingly useful.

  • In the notebooks view, would be useful to have the option to filter ‘uncollected’ notebooks, which would help in tidying up notebooks that have yet to be arranged into collections. With notebooks stretching back 8 years now, I have plenty of orphan notebooks I had forgotten about that would usefully be tidied into various archive collections.

Old collection view: Single thumbnail view when set explicitly helps keep browsing manageable.

collectionsOld
collectionsOld1920×1171 302 KB

New collection view: 2x2 mosaic for each collection makes browsing / searching a little harder.

collectionsNew
collectionsNew1920×793 374 KB

2

Agreed! Have you seen the New notebook button on the collection page at the top right? It lets you create a new notebook within an existing collection. (You can also add ?collection=foo to a /new link if you want to bookmark or share a link with students to create a new notebook within an existing collection.) That’s the most convenient way to add to a collection in New Observable now, but we’ll be adding full collection editing soon.

3

Sure. I was thinking specifically about first exposure (as part of induction). I don’t think there’s a way to create collections within 2.0, so would currently rely on someone else doing that on the beginner’s behalf. And quite early on in a beginner’s journey they are likely to create a notebook first then realise they want to put it in a collection afterwards.

Useful to know about the full URL to a collection - thanks.