Submit location form: bug + UX snag with observed on + fruiting status

[wbazant]

We have a validation rule to expect observation date whenever fruiting status is populated. This produces friction: a user chooses "ripe fruit" or so, tries to submit, and it doesn't work. The user might then notice observed on went red, and fill it out, but the button is still disabled (except actually, it's possible to submit).

Lots of wrong here, and some options I see are:

• make the "observed on" always required, if not unconfirmed
• default the "observed on" to the review's date once fruiting status is set
• remove the validation rule entirely, and add the default value when interpreting the data
• add an error message just under "Submit" explaining the validation rule we have, and fix the bug with the button (still some friction but reduced as far as we can)

@ezwelty what do you think about this one? Do you e.g. know how often the review date matches observation date?

[ezwelty]

@wbazant Ah yes, I noticed that the date picker needs to lose focus before the form validation recognizes the form as valid.

default the "observed on" to the review's date once fruiting status is set
remove the validation rule entirely, and add the default value when interpreting the data

According to the database, about 20% of observations have an observed date different from the created date. So not the most common use case, but an important distinction for when people post locations or reviews (e.g. based on a gallery of accumulated photos), where assuming today would result in a very wrong phenological observation. This is valuable information for future seasonality filters, so I hesitate to collect a bunch of ambiguously dated phenology observations ("maybe it was observed on the date it was posted, maybe not").

Perhaps we could add a little button to the right of the date picker that covers the most common case: "today". If we wanted to get fancy, we could extract CaptureTime from the EXIF of uploaded photos, and if different from "today", add that to the "quick select" options. Depending on the source of the image, capture time in EXIF may be absent or very wrong. A special case is if the photo is directly from device camera, which would make "today" very likely, but not sure if that's something we want to attempt to distinguish.

[wbazant]

Sure, it makes sense as conditionally required then! One more idea I have for how to achieve it is to disable Fruiting Status until Observation Date is populated, with some kind of note about what is conditionally required - then there's no way to fill it out wrong.

[wbazant]

the date picker needs to lose focus before the form validation recognizes the form as valid

I've learned we've intentionally set validateOnChange=false in Formik, maybe for performance reasons in the past. Proposed resolution to this issue is to enable validateOnChange - then after setting fruiting status, the observation field immediately goes red, and although the rule is not explained anywhere it might be enough to let users observe it.

If we see users struggle, we can do more on this.