Eliminating Friction
There are two essential aspects to design:
- Adding new features
- Improving existing features (Optimization)
Both are important. From the perspective of User Experience (UX), one of the basic ways of improving existing features is by eliminating friction.
As concerns the graph view, certain features are functional, but the experience of using them could be improved.
For instance, the graph-filtering search could be much better.
- When you search for a tag by typing
tag:, the tag list is a mess, especially if you use nested tags, which makes it hard to find the desired tag (friction-point). - Unlike the main search field, the search history for the graph is not saved, so you have to go through the process described above every time (friction-point x2).
Ideally, you should be able to quickly switch between multiple graph filtering configurations. Improving the graph filtering experience requires both adding features (eg the option to save/load filter configurations) and removing friction.
The process of improving the graph experience could start with identifying and systematically eliminating friction points.