Renaming 'stores' to 'places'

Hello there,
as you might have heard, we started trying to make Karrot into a more general tool half a year ago.

This first started with the Bike Kitchen Gothenburg wanting to test Karrot to manage their opening times and bike pickups. For this, they’d create a ‘store’ that is the bike workshop and ‘pickups’ for the shifts that people can sign up for. To organize their bike pickups they’d create a ‘store’ that saves the location and contact information of the building complex where bikes can be picked up and don’t use the ‘pickup’ feature, because bike pickups are dynamically arranged when someone has the capacity to save the bikes. As you can see in these cases, our ‘stores’ are rather like ‘places’ and ‘pickups’ are more generally like ‘events’.

Interestingly, we saw that some foodsaving groups also make use of stores in a more general way. EfA for example uses ‘stores’ and ‘pickups’ not only for pickups, but also for drop-offs (e.g. ‘store’ → orphanage, ‘pickup’ → ‘Who can make a bread delivery on Tuesdays at 4 pm?’) and Solikyl uses the same features also to organize their weekly hang-outs (e.g. ‘store’ → meeting place, ‘pickup’ → ‘Who will attend the hang-out on Friday at 6 pm?’).

That’s why we have decided to rename ‘stores’ to ‘places’. In the code it already happened, but also the UI will soon be adapted. On dev.karrot.world it is already changed and you can check it out there.

You’ll see that the change is most visible in the sidenav. Here the word changes and the shopping cart icon will be replaced by the more general circle dot, which will also be the new icon for the place markers on the map:

All phrases that used to contain the word ‘store’ will now employ the word ‘place’. (This will break the existing translations of those phrases, which means that they need to be adapted in transifex, otherwise the English phrase will display.)

What do you think about this? Any concerns?

2 Likes

Sounds like it will be a mess… Well, we are called Foodsaving, aren’t we? Is there any option that people who want to modify it to something else do it only for their version?

I don’t see the point of renaming ‘stores’ to ‘places’.

Im one of the ones wanting to use karrot for something else than exaxtly foodsaving, but i still dont see the problem,its a tool thats ‘invented’ for foodsaving. And if someone wants to use it for something else, then its just a pro explaining why the addresses are named ‘stores’, and in the same time explaining foodsharing to a new person.

Does it look like a mess to you @karolina? Do you think people will be confused and maybe are not smart enough that they will think the stores on the list are not stores any more? Or are you concerned that newbies in the group will not be able to tell from the context what these places are?

Yes, they can fork and run their own instance of Karrot. Although this is still a change for foodsaving. All groups that want more specific features and do their own little tweaks can do that btw.

I just agree with @Disa that it doesn’t seem needed. This is a foodsaving tool that is open-source and can be adjusted for other needs, but it should stay a foodsaving/sharing tool in the main version.

Do you understand that the change is also intended for foodsaving groups and that there is actually a reason for it, within the scope of foodsaving? Please, read Janina’s post again more carefully and let’s address that argument instead.

Yes, I did read everything. It’s maybe just that we don’t need it, so that’s why I do not see that much benefit, but let it be, it’s not a bigger problem. Who knows, maybe one day we will appreciate this change.

I think that ‘places’ is a fitting name even for just foodsaving. You can save food at cafés, market stands, factories and canteens, which are not strictly ‘stores’.
From a historic perspective, ‘stores’ was used as translation for the German ‘Betriebe’, which rather means ‘company’ and is more general already.
We didn’t bother renaming so far because most users were able to tolerate slightly non-fitting names. In recent usability tests, it became obvious that renaming ‘stores’ to something else might greatly benefit some active groups on Karrot.

My remaining concern is not about the name, but the new icon - it looks like a DVD, which is a bit confusing on map markers.
What do you all think about removing the icon from place markers completely? It’s the most common marker type, so removing it would reduce optical clutter. (User and group markers keep their icon)

Thanks for your acceptance, @karolina, I understand that not all groups may find this change beneficial. I just hope it doesn’t cause bigger inconveniences to you…

I’m in favor of removing the circle dot icon from the map markers, @tiltec. Let’s do it before the release! :blush:

Regarding the icon, I figured that it might work to just use the ‘circle’ for places:

Opinions?

Hm…
I understand that the toggle button on the upper right needs some icon and can’t be just blank - so removing it altogether seems not to be the suitable solution after all. But the circle is so generic that it’s a bit confusing. Still, I don’t have a better idea and there’s an explanatory tooltip, so I guess it’s okay.

Why not just keep the symbol as it is and change the name…

Or have a picture of as house, most places are indoors…

Hm dunno, to me that would seem very inconsistent. But given the lack of good ideas for icons it’s definitely worth considering…^^

True. But the house icon is already used for the group (as you can see on the fullscreen map).

Yeah, that might be the best solution for now, to keep some familiarity.

We can override the icon for the bike kitchen group anyways.