On a more positive note, I wanted to come back to something Davor said in his last email that seemed worth reiterating. Given that as a project Chandler strives to fundamentally change and hopefully improve the way people interact with their personal information, it's encouraging to hear that the UI looks and feels remarkably standard, in spite of the fact that we're introducing new structural concepts like the Faceted sidebar and Stamping. If this sidebar checkbox thing is really the most controversial UI problem we have in 0.6, overall we're in pretty good shape! :o) What might help is to adopt unconventional solutions in the rest of the UI. (Not that any are coming to my mind right now though.) It's like UI in computer games: game designers are free to adopt highly unconventional, but also highly effective and often immediately usable, interfaces because it's immediately obvious that they are not following standard desktop application guidelines. But when everything else in the UI looked like standard widgets, the icon's behaviour on mouseover looked like a bug to someone who was just fooling around with the UI for 15 minutes without reading much user docs or the functional spec. :-) Sorry, I may have dragged this discussion for too long. I'd be happy to try out various designs since this is the one time when Chandler can easily afford to play with alternatives without upsetting an established user base, and obviously the user testing that you've been conducting should be even more useful. |
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