On Monday 08 February 2010 21:49:37 Ian Clarke wrote: > 2010/2/8 Clément Vollet <cvol...@gmail.com> > > > What do you put behind "casual"? Will this UI target newbies as well as > > advanced users (an advanced user can not be interested in aiding the > > Freenet > > development effort), or is there a limit somewhere. > > I think by "casual" we are referring to people who want to search for and > retrieve content, upload and share content, and participate in discussions. > We are not referring to Freenet developers and testers, who will probably > need to continue to use FProxy.
I strongly object to this. We do not want to have two completely different interfaces with two completely different looks and feels, and with a jarring change when you go from one to the other. And who decides what is casual use anyway? Casual users in mainline China for example will need to be able to add Friends, and set the security levels. And we cannot afford to not ask people: the first-time wizard will have to remain in place, and IMHO so will some visible indication of security level (preferably via means of easily understood color coded icons, with brief explanations in tooltips or dropdowns). Casual users interested in censorship resistant blogging (IMHO an important demographic) will need to be able to make a blog using FlogHelper. Anyone who uses Freetalk to chat will need to be able to set trust levels (although this does not necessarily mean we need the Community menu). And so on. And nothing in the PDF actually requires GWT so far. > > > And also, if the aim is to target all casual users (from newbie to > > advanced), > > how will this be acheived? (since I don't think they both have the same > > workflow) > > The challenge will be that it can meet the needs of diverse users. If > Google can do it (and Google's UI is one of the inspirations for the new > mockup) then I think we can too. A two tier system where the advanced tier looks completely different will not meet diverse needs, it will segregate advanced users from everyone else and put people off making the transition. > > I think the difference is that designing the UI properly requires a lot more > thought than the previous approach, which was basically to create the > fastest and most obvious UI layer to expose the functionality we had > implemented. > > To put it another way, good UIs are designed starting with the user and > working backwards. FProxy was designed more-or-less from the back forward. There are other issues with user interfaces than meeting user expectations. Sometimes those expectations cannot be practically met and they need to be managed: Search is slow, a google style central box may exacerbate this. Sometimes there are overheads that the user needs to be aware of (e.g. security levels). And we need to seriously address the question of how to deal with messages - everything from Freenet is updating itself to bookmark X has updated to you have a message from peer Y or a Freemail from anonymous person Z. Apart from messages, there is the question of where is the rest of the functionality? - Queued downloads/uploads. Arguably only needs to be shown if we have queued stuff. - Security levels as icons as I mentioned before. Or can we get away with this somehow after the wizard? - The blogging tool. - Friends. Needs to be shown in any case because we want people to add friends even if they only care about performance, and in some situations it is the only way to get any sort of connectivity. - Identity management. We are logged in as identity X, we can log out and use a different one. Should be visible. Logged in identity is used for Freetalk but probably also for other WoT apps too.
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
_______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org http://osprey.vm.bytemark.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
