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Training schedule readability

A tricky meta-question. I’ve been experimenting with ways to display an overview of training days (or days grouped by audience/topics, like Developers or DBAs), locations, and schedule.

Product Audience BNE SYD CBR MEL ADL AKL
MySQL Dev Sep Aug Sep Aug
MySQL DBA Sep Jul Aug Aug Aug Jul
MySQL HA Aug
PostgreSQL DBA Jul Jul
PHP QA Dev Aug Aug

With the number of locations I have now, it’s easy to run out of space horizontally. And vertically can’t make the list too long either, otherwise the nice simple overview is lost. It’s a difficult problem and I haven’t fully resolved it. Displaying the locations vertically and the topics horizontally doesn’t seem to work either. Different pages on the Open Query web site now display things differently depending on context, and I hope to learn more from that experiment. The above is an example of this. Compact, but I’m not sure it conveys sufficient information. Within each group, people are able to sign up for individual course days. It’s work in progress I suppose. Suggestions welcome!

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1 thought on “Training schedule readability

  1. Well, you need to partition, definitely. 🙂 The problem is that there does not seem to be one clear variable on which to base a split of the data.

    Most course websites allow you to search by date, by location, or by course. Searching by date you can get a list of locations and courses for the specified date(s); searching by location you can get a list of courses and dates for a location; searching by course you can get a list of locations and dates.

    All of these may be useful — I know, you’re thinking “well obviously the course and the location are parameters to search on”. However, depending on how close cities are, folks may want to search on date (or a range of dates, for instance “trainings in September”).

    For example, I could take training in Burlington, MA; Boston, MA; or New York City, NY. I have family in NY and it’s only a 4-hour drive/bus ride from Boston.

    I think the best thing would be to let people choose, but don’t force them too. Give an option to show everything (filtering on 0 variables), and allow people to filter any or all of the three variables you (currently) have. Maybe someone travels between Sydney and Perth a few times a year; even though they’re on opposite coasts, there’s probably someone who might want to do that. So instead of (or in addition to) something like “I live in Sydney, show me training courses within x kilometers of me”, why not have a list of cities that a customer could choose zero or more of?

    Similarly with dates and courses. I’ve certainly been in the tricky situation of “I need to take a course between now and the end of the year, but I can’t leave work during August, November and December; I can take a course in one of 3 cities near me; and I am interested in either MySQL DBA or PostgreSQL DBA.”

    If you start out with the large overview, you can still appease someone who wants to see it ALL, yet have your menu/choices at the top so people who find it too much can start filtering right away.

    Extra bonus: Allow people to save/bookmark a search so they can see if you’ve added “any course in SYD in October or November” or “MySQL Dev anywhere in December”.

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