An area of CLUMP that we felt needed some work on was the length of time it could take for a list to reload after a user had gone into an item. Having discussed it for a while we decided to try using a popup for leaf nodes rather than actually moving into them.

Identifying if something is a leaf node or not is quite easy, we just need to see if its structural unit type can have any children. If it can then it isn’t a leaf node and we treat it as normal. If it can’t have any children then it is a leaf node and rather than putting in a link to move into the item we put in a link that displays it in a popup box.

The popup boxes have made a great improvement to the usability of CLUMP for both students and staff. When viewing large lists there is no longer any need for users to wait for a reading list to reload just because they decided to look at an item’s details.