Mimi Yin wrote:
I've been performing informal drive-by usability with some
very non-technical people here in New York who belong in the "Mom" and
"Dad" camp and aren't particularly info-centric, but who are
nonetheless dying for a shareable, read-writeable calendaring solution.
The most interesting thing is that it's not so much the collection icon
swapping out with the checkbox icon that's the problem. It's more the
notion that clicking on the collection name does something DIFFERENT
from clicking on the checkbox icon. (Which speaks to Davor's comment
that maybe the rollover effect should be bigger somehow. Though bigger
feedback always needs to be counterbalanced with feedback that won't
annoy people over time.)
What about if clicking on a collection ALSO checked it, like iCal does
- then you could click between selections and you'd see the checkmark
as you navigate between collections.. then if you got savvy, you'd see
you could click the checkmark independently. It always looks a little
strange to me that I can 'check' three collections, and then 'select'
another, that the 'selected' one isn't checked.
The Zimbra screenshots are interesting because they have this exact
issue and the way they seem to address it is to have a check box next
to the calendar icon:
http://downloads.zimbra.com/blog_pics/1027_calendar_week.jpg
Other things I noticed with zimbra:
- they designate color in the sidebar with a background color -
personally I think that looks really ugly
- they designate the "shared" status with some people in front of the
calendar icon.
- it isn't clear from the screenshot if you can actually click a
calendar to display it, or if you must use the check boxes
Alec
I'm working on visual tweaks that will make the checkbox
icon feel more separate from the collection name.
I'd like to do some more testing when I get back to SF on people who
are more computer-centric in their jobs. The users I tested still don't
really understand when to single click versus double-click (although
they all understood how to cmd-click to multi-select things!).
This became a real problem when switching between calendars in the
sidebar because they kept going into edit mode...which of course wipes
out the icon on the left completely right now and made it all but
impossible for the users to notice feedback in the collection icon
area.
I will post my usability notes when I have more of a critical mass of
data.
Thanks!
Mimi
P.S. I'm curious to know from people on the list: Was anyone simply
stuck as to how to overlay calendars or not even aware that you could
overlay calendars? Or was it more that the rollover effect felt like a
bug because it was visually jarring?
On Oct 27, 2005, at 11:24 PM, Katie Capps Parlante wrote:
John Anderson wrote:
Yes. Exactly. This is what I've been saying
for months and months. It was obvious...
If you've already made your point, then doing so again more rudely does
not contribute productively to the argument. Its much more useful to
clarify a point or contribute a new proposal. Let's focus on
constructive actions we can take from here.
I think we all agree that we'd like to do some user testing on both the
current sidebar and on upcoming 0.7 designs before we start
implementation. Mimi is going to proceed with that plan.
We're all too close to the design and implementation to be completely
objective (developers and designers alike) -- this is a well known
pitfall of application development. I'm confident that we as a team can
be open to what we learn from users and use good judgement to arrive at
a design that works for us.
Mimi and Sheila will get back to us with next steps for the design. In
the meantime I think we need to not get distracted by this particular
bug and focus on getting out 0.6.
Cheers,
Katie
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