The workaround to have date ranges be presented as day-dates could be confusing to the user

[laurensorensen]

The example here refers to this one druid, within a range, from 1936-01-01 to 1945-12-31
There are other examples like this because some evidence comes from 1930s and 20s but few and far between.

The way it shows up in the date facet makes it so the user may think there are multiple items/druids to discover, and can only find out there is only one item/druid by clicking through by the day, one by one (they then find out there is only one document applicable to the year 1938). Is it possible to make it so if there is only one document in a year, there is only one result appearing?

[laurensorensen]

It looks like a user can click the year and see the one document returned and it's clear then that it's one document. I wonder if we could get rid of the [+] icon next to those that only have one item/druid, so that they don't click that to expand to months/days and so then become confused / think they will need to click through to multiple day-dates?

[jcoyne]

What if the range ended in April some time? Would it be helpful to show that the document is relevant only from the 8th-15th for instance?

I'm worried that users would be troubled by the inconsistency of the interface if it changes depending on the count of items.

[laurensorensen]

Leaving this for Gary to review when he's back.

[ggeisler]

As I mentioned to @laurensorensen and @marlo-longley in a meeting yesterday, I agree this is potentially confusing to the user (especially before that user has selected a document to see what is returned in the results) but it is logically consistent and (at least potentially) understandable after the user sees what documents are returned for different selections. I'd worry that any workaround to the facet display itself might end up equally confusing, just in a different way.

Also, maintaining the individual days even when they refer to the same document could be helpful to the user who is really focused on understanding what documents are relevant for a specific date. If we hid the expand button at the months or days level the user wouldn't be able to confirm that that one document does apply to the specific date they are interested in (they'd have to infer that from the fact we are omitting the expand button, which is likely not intuitive).

So I'd say we just leave it as is, and over time we can see whether we get questions from users that indicate this is particularly confusing to them.

Alternatively, and I'm not suggesting this is even technically feasible (I don't know that we've ever injected something special into a facet panel), we could explore whether it is worth adding an info box to explain how things work: