On Saturday 21 November 2009 12:00:58 Cl?ment wrote: > On Friday 20 November 2009 16:38:33 Ian Clarke wrote: > > My wife Janie, who (among other things) is a GUI designer, may have some > > free time over the next few months, and I'm trying to persuade her to > > attempt a ground-up redesign of Freenet's UI. She has built UIs in GWT > > before (to critical acclaim within her company), and I think this would be > > a good route for Freenet too. > > > > I think our current problem is that despite our best efforts, the current > > UI is built "from the code forward", rather than "from the user back", and > > as such I think it is fundamentally flawed. Despite how much we try, I > > think it is very difficult for us to put ourselves in the shoes of an > > ordinary Freenet user, we are already too immersed in the concepts and > > jargon of Freenet. > > > > The answer I think is a completely fresh perspective from someone that is > > unpolluted by existing Freenet concepts and jargon, who can focus on the > > user's needs to get stuff done, rather than our need to expose > > functionality. > > > > Janie has asked if we could put together a document describing the "use > > cases", basically the tasks that should be achievable from Freenet's UI > > from the user's perspective, but *not* simply a list of the > > functionalities that must be exposed. > > > > I've started a collaborative document here, all are welcome to contribute, > > but please read the notes at the top: > > > > http://etherpad.com/5GB8lyh5qD > > > > Ian. > > > > If this can help, I sent a message some times ago. Here it is: > > Hello, I felt bored tonight, so I wrote this. > > This is just a beginning, but in order to have a good UI, we need to adress > those questions with all the attention they deserve. In particular, the > raison > d'etre (why a new UI?) and the model of the user (what is our target > audience?). > > FREENET UI > > => Raison d'etre: > > "To allow the user to access all (or the more of) the services provided by a > Freenet node. > > Current limitations: > - A lot of users complain about Freenet being complicated to use > - Some menus/sub-menus contain too many elements, when other contain too few > - Some informations presented to the user are complicated, and make him ask a > lot of questions > - Some informations presented to the user are related to the node's internal > logic
Here concerning myself primarily with the first-time wizard, your points are valid in other areas: Most of the complexity in the first time wizard is irreducible. We have to ask the user because if we just assume the defaults, then either it will have too high a security level for the average user, resulting in its being way too slow, or it will have too low a security level for the user who has genuine concerns, resulting in them getting hurt. Also, I do think that we need to ask the user about the disk space and bandwidth usage. Quite a few of our installs, when we had stats on these things, were due to freenet taking an unexpectedly large chunk of the disk etc. Having said that, we do need to discuss what to put in the first time wizard. We may have gone too far in the direction of dumbing down and not telling the user what they need to know, but if we do tell them what they need to know it's a lot of text - this is WHY we reduced it! -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 835 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20091121/c720f40a/attachment.pgp>
