John,
Thanks so much for your thoughtful email! This is great feedback and
we're excited to make this new tool better.
You have indeed mentioned some of the points that we're working on,
namely: a template for the component pages that will have anchored
sections that clearly match up with the elements in the indicator and
the progress indicator situated within that page -- that should help
with some understandability. We'll also have the progress indicators
living on that page eventually.
But you also bring up some really good points that we need to
address: namely "completeness" and what it means, explaining
"families" of components like reorderer, and how to represent features
of the components we haven't even thought of adding, but will be added
to a "complete" component? So, we've got some work to do on this.
We look forward to working with y'all on implementation! And have
Nico get in touch with us about implementation of the Layout Customizer.
Best,
Jess
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jess Mitchell
Project Manager / Fluid Project
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
/ w / 617.326.7753 / c / 919.599.5378
jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.fluidproject.org
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On Sep 5, 2008, at 4:41 AM, John Norman wrote:
First I want to say this is a great resource, BUT...
I just had occasion to actually want to *use* a progress indicator.
This is good news, Nico came to me saying he wanted to put the Fluid
Reorderer into the Sakai UX work. So first I went to look at his demo
of it working with the Nathan's new skin and Sakai gadgets (I was
worried by the clunky drag and drop I had seen when I last looked).
The experience was good, very familiar and ext-like so I agreed it
might be ready to use. But then I thought, so how finished is it and
what is the likelihood of a big change coming along and disrupting
the UX project in some way by doing something unexpected or unwanted,
or it turning out to have poor performance so we had to pull it back
out until fixed. The progress chart seemed the obvious place to get
answers so I went and looked. I found myself with fewer answers than I
expected and thought I should share the experience.
1. First problem: what component should I be looking at? There seemed
to be 2 possibilities Layout Customiser and Reorderer. Nico seemed
pretty confident that he had used the Layout Customiser so that is
what we looked at, but I noted that the page assumed you understood
what each component did - a very brief description for disambiguation
purposes in this case would have been useful.
2. Next problem was; what does "complete" mean. Until the Flash
uploader incident, I would probably not have questioned this and
assumed that "complete" meant feature complete and fully tested for
heavy production load - i.e. 'production ready'. The Flash uploader is
"complete" but there is a massive risk associated with the Flash
Player 10 non-functionality that is not mentioned, potentially
allowing me to make a poor production decision, so perhaps 'complete'
does not mean 'production ready'. I looked for a definition of
"complete" but didn't readily find one.
3. Next problem is the elements on the page (like "columns" or
"locked"). I wondered what they meant. There seemed to be a
correlation to the items listed below the colour bar, but all items
linked to a single specification page that did not easily correlate
with the names, i.e. even by reading the specification page I could
not tell the scope of specification that related to the name "columns"
and that was marked as complete.
4. Finally, there was a white item marked "..." and a corresponding
item on the bottom of the list. I didn't know what to make of this. I
assumed it meant the spec scope was unfinished and there was an
indefinite amount of unknown work still to be done, so progress could
be 80% done or 5% done and there was no way to know when the component
might be finished.
So for this single example, the entry turned out to be almost totally
useless for *my* purpose, which was to decide if it was safe to
consider using the component in a production environment.
I wrote this down to try to be helpful, not to criticise. I appreciate
that it is work in progress and I would like to remind you of the good
news - we are thinking we might be ready to put the component into our
production code and built it into the UX work. I just thought that I
had an example of the intended use of the page and you should know
that in its current form it turns out to be less useful than it
appeared on the surface when I looked at it for the conference call.
Best, John
On 3 Sep 2008, at 21:00, Jess Mitchell wrote:
I think these look awesome. And I think it's meaningful that I've
been pointing people to this page all day while having conversations
about components.
Wonderful work y'all.
Jess
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jess Mitchell
Project Manager / Fluid Project
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
/ w / 617.326.7753 / c / 919.599.5378
jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.fluidproject.org
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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