Category: Usability

sbackup

Was looking for a painless utility to do regular incremental backups of a bunch of stuff on my Ubuntu box today, and ran across sbackup, which was sponsored by Google’s summer of code. The UI could do with a little polish, but it was dead easy to set up, and so far it looks like it’s just the job. (Might even have a go at getting it to work on OSX, as I’ve yet to find a free OSX utility that does what I want quite so easily.)

HIG Facelift

I fiddled around with the online appearance of the draft HIG a bit yesterday… basically created a CSS for it, to try and prettify the raw docbook->HTML output somewhat. Here’s an example of the old and new look.

It’s very much work in progress, as I’m kind of learning about stylesheets and docbook customisation as I’m going along, and there are a few obvious bugs and things I haven’t got to yet. But I hope you’ll already find it a bit easier to read… personally, I’m quite pleased with the tables 🙂

Hopefully we’ll be able to push out a HIG 2.2 release fairly soon, after which I’d like to see us do a bit of an overhaul on the whole document. IMHO it’s getting too big and wordy, and isn’t really laid out as helpfully as it might be. I’m thinking we might want to focus more on the types of UI that developers are actually trying to create (document editor, applet, desktop preference dialog etc.), rather than have them piece together the information from a chapters about windows, menus, and controls.

But at the end of the day, you’re the people who have to use it… let us know what you think!

Send a GEGL

From the Microsoft Office UI blog:

Q: What is “Send a Smile?”

A: There’s a general philosophy Microsoft has been embracing more and more in all of our beta products, which is that people should be able to send one-off comments as easily as possible, while they’re “in the moment.” Windows XP had a “Comments?” link in every dialog box that let you tell us if the dialog was stupid. Previous versions of Office had the same thing.

Send-a-Smile is a related tool that goes a bit further. Anywhere, anytime, someone can click a “smiley face” to tell us they like something or a “frowny face” to tell us they don’t like something. We get a lot of context (with the user’s permission of course), including a screenshot, sometimes a short movie of the last 30 seconds, related documents, etc. There’s another tool called the Office Feedback Tool (also known as “Ebert”) which does a similar thing but with Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down.

All of these tools work on the principal that if someone has to open a newsreader, log onto a newsgroup, type a long message, and send it, we’ll lose a lot of valuable feedback just due to complacency. The idea is to reduce the barrier to entry for sending comments so that we get more data from the “heat of the moment.”

And of course, we have all sorts of tools that help us sort an analyze the feedback on the back-end.

I really like even the simple “Comments?” idea, and it would be cool if GNOME could do something similar in its development releases. It would probably need some sort of toolkit support so it could be easily added to any window or dialog, and easily turned off for the final builds. And of course, the hard part would be analysing all that data. But from the user’s point of view, it would be pretty unobtrusive, and would probably capture that Kodak Moment a lot better than having to go and file a bug report. (Plus, of course, people don’t file bug reports about cool stuff that Just Worked.)

A decade of usability

Yikes, it’s ten years today since the first real project I worked on (for money) produced its first real deliverable.

I was employed by Logica (now LogicaCMG) in Cambridge, but was working with a team of other usability folk from Logica, Admiral Consulting (now part of LogicaCMG themselves), Microsoft, GUI Designers and others at Reuters’ now-defunct Usability Group just off Fleet Street in London.

With insufficient funding to build their own in-house team, Reuters’ Greg Garrison decided to form a virtual team’ of usability consultants from various companies, who could be called upon as they were required. The rest of the time, they would be back in their own offices, being paid by their own companies. (In practice, it didn’t quite work like that; most of us were there 10 or 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, blowing the budget on a variety of wild ideas.)

And the deliverable? A multimedia extravaganza of usability examples, guidelines and icon libraries on CD-ROM, all produced in Macromedia Director, Microsoft Visual Basic, and Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop (all of which were at about Version 3 in those days). And burned on the office’s own CD burner– which cost about three grand, and took half an hour to burn a disc.

I can’t say that the work was always a whole lot of fun… long hours, personality clashes, artistic differences and inter-company rivalry were never too far from the surface, and because the virtual team thing was considered innovative at the time, Greg was always trailing all sorts of media and BPR types around the office (and particularly the usability lab that was part of it) while you were trying to get your work done. But most of the stuff we did, and the CD-ROM itself, still stands up pretty well, I learned a whole lot from the people I was working with, and made some good friends. (The occasional spot of wild partying in London was a bonus, too…)

Add to Panel redux

A few weeks ago I posted my initial reaction to the new ‘Add to Panel’ dialog that had snuck into Ubuntu Breezy, and it wasn’t very positive 🙂 It also provoked the most comments I’ve ever had on a blog entry, many in agreement, and some not.

To his credit, Manu took my comments very well, pointed out one or two things about the design that I hadn’t noticed, and asked me if I’d blog about it again once the design had settled down a bit.

So, here I am looking at it again.

On the positive side, it now fits on an 800×600 screen, and the categories are all filled out a bit more, so the initial “what a waste of space” reaction is gone (although it still hits a bit if you scroll down to the Internet and Multimedia sections, which only have one item apiece in them.)

To be honest, I don’t think I’m ever really going to like the OSX SystemPrefs-like layout; the first impression you get when the window opens is that the icons are arranged almost randomly, because they’re sorted in three dimensions rather than the simple alphabetical list we’ve all become used to. The description of each applet is also rather hidden away (near the bottom of the dialog), compared to the old design where it’s right beside the applet in question. Tooltips might work better here.

The search box is promising, but needs a little more work to be spot on (ignoring, for the moment, the fact that it works like nothing else in GNOME). It filters the visible list based on what you type, searching both the applet names and descriptions. So, typing ‘sound’ will leave you with just the “Volume Control” applet on display. It doesn’t actually select any results, though, even when there’s only one matching applet, so you can’t just hit Enter straight away to add it. Nor are the results ranked in any way, so if I search for ‘log’, I get ‘Blog Entry Poster’ and ‘Log Out’ in that order, even though it’s most likely ‘Log Out’ that I’m looking for. That’s probably not a big deal with the small search domain we’re dealing with here, though.

Another problem is that the applet descriptions can’t (and shouldn’t) include every word that a user will search for. As an example, the first four search terms I used to try and ‘find’ the Rhythmbox applet were MP3, CD, player and jukebox, none of which gave me any matches. We’d probably need some sort of hidden keyword system for this to work as well as Apple’s does.

Other minor gripes are that it doesn’t currently allow multiple selections, and longer applet names get clipped. A bigger issue is the icons on display don’t seem to respect the current theme, which will need to be fixed to be considered accessible.

Verdict: it’s a lot better, and I expect I could live with it. But personally I still prefer the old one 🙂