Welcome to the Synoptic Key of Life! The Synoptic Key is meant to guide you through creating a technical description of your collection. These instructions are for mushrooms with a cap and stem. They are somewhat generalizable to other macrofungi (mushrooms big enough to see with the bare eye).
The general plan is to start at the top of the mushroom and work our way down to the base. Once we've described all the macro features, we follow the same plan for microscopic features.
You should be able to get reasonable results with non-technical language since the search is based on semantics (meaning). As you gain experience with making descriptions, you'll want to learn the technical terms, both for better results, and to understand the descriptions the tool returns to you.
Tip: The Vocabulary feature tool is the only one populated at the start of writing a description. It provides a huge nested menu of feature descriptions and is kind of noisy. But if you have a term in mind, you may find some help here.
Once you have a partial description, press the Search button. This should populate the two feature selection tools based on decision trees, the Text Features and JSON Features. These provide hints about what you might want to look at next to narrow your search.
Many older descriptions use Color Standards and Color Nomenclature by Robert Ridgway to identify colors. You can use these colors too.