Ruby on Rails

On Jul 19, 2013, at 7:15 AM, Chris Sciolla <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:

> @tamouse_m, thank for your insight. Those are great questions and I'll
> be sure to note them. So here are the best answers I have. In this
> particular situation, users are visiting static pages of information.
> There are no real dynamic tasks involved, just browsing pages and
> subpages.
>
> In this case, a user will visit www.example.com. This root page lists
> all states included in the database. The user will click on a state, and
> that page will list all the towns, within that state, that are in the
> database. Next the user clicks a specific town link. On this particular
> page, there is a main navigation with each of the pages I originally
> listed in a navbar. Profiles has three subpages. In each of these pages,
> there is static HTML, that differs for each town, for viewing purposes
> only. So it's fair to assume that these pages and subpages exist for
> each town. Nothing dynamic. On top of this, I would like a simple admin
> are where I can add new states, pages, and information to the
> pages/subpages as well.
>
> This is easily handled by something like WordPress, because it's a
> simple CMS tool. However, I want to use this particular example to learn
> more about RoR. Hopefully I've clearly stated the tasks involved in the
> ux.

I'm still unclear *why* a user would be browsing these pages. What information are they looking for? What question does this information answer for them? What sorts of things will they be able to do once they have this info?

The steps you list are necessary to outline, for sure, but why do you want/need to put your user through them to get at the information they are seeking? That is the important question to answer early, I think. If you think about it, drilling down can be a very slow exercise for users, especially if they have a slow network connection and have to wait for page loads, etc., even if your app is serving up largely static data. Think about how your user is going to see this and get right down the bone on what they need to see, and not put operations in their way if not needed. I think, perhaps, you've spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to organize the data, which is a good thing, really, but not necessarily enough time yet thinking about how the user would be best served in accessing it, which can be completely different than how it's persisted in the backend.





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