Daryl Hepting wrote:
Hello;
I am about to start teaching an undergraduate course in human
computer interaction for the fall semester (about a week away
now) and I will be asking my students to look at lyx. I have
been using LaTeX for years and I've had a bit of experience
with lyx. I'm interested in how well (new) users can work with
lyx.
I joined the e-mail lists last week and I am impressed by
the amount of traffic on both the user and development lists.
What do I hope to come up with at the end of the semester? I
expect that students will come up with some design alternatives
for various aspects of the lyx interface.
Interesting!
Some things to consider about user interface design:
* The mouse is nice, but the (expert) user should be able to
get around with the keyboard only too. Not because the
mouse gets lost, but the keyboard is so much faster
when you know all the shortcuts.
In LyX, you may want to have a look at how the paragraph
types (standard, bullet list, sectioning, and so on) can be
set without the mouse. This is a huge timesaver - the
paragraph type list is just a single mouse click away. Still,
Typing ALT P B to get a bullet list or ALT P 3 for the third
level of sectioning is so much faster.
Also, all the math can be typed as latex commands. Typing
\frac<space> is much faster than looking up fractions in
the math menus.
* Small popup windows is considered bad. A big dialog is ok,
when there is lots of information to fill in. But most of the
time you spend on the small popups is spent on the "OK"
button - and that is wasted time. LyX have a status line
at the bottom where it is possible to show small messages
without requiring the user to click anything at all.
Of course LyX has its share of annoying small popups, so
this is a field where your students may make improvements.
* The worst "annoying popup" is the search & replace dialog.
Search, and often enough the word you search for will be
found - UNDER the stupid dialog. And sometimes you search
just to get to a certain place in a big document, but then
you have to get rid of the search popup before you can type.
Now, there are occations when the search dialog is useful,
it contains some options that sometimes are useful. And it
may be extended to do more complicated searches - regexps
or searching/replacing formatted text.
What many want, but can't find time to code, is an alternative
search - a simple search that use no popup, just a text entry
field that shows up in the status area when some "search hotkey"
is pressed. I.e. a firefox/emacs/vi style search, instead of
a dialog. The existing dialog should be preserved though,
as it have more options.
* The LyX editor and file format supports some operations and
insets that currently cannot be entered - because the
menus and keybindings are behind LyX capabilities.
Adding interfaces for such things should be nice student work.
I would like these
to be contributions to the lyx project. We are very interested
in open source software development here at my university and
if all goes well, we might even have a class in winter 2007,
that could work at implementing these alternatives -- again,
as a contribution to the project.
In preparation for the class, I plan to post a separate
questionnaire to the lyx-users and lyx-devel lists. All
responses will be carefully reviewed. For those who are
interested, I will also post details of the study
that the students will conduct here, using participants from
the participant pool that we have here. Basically, we will be
recruiting people who self-report proficiency in either LaTeX
or MS Word and then ask them to format a sample document using
their preferred of those 2 tools and lyx.
Now that could be an interesting test, especially the comparison
with word. How do you plan on doing this?
I suggest handing them a large document that
is entirely in ascii. Then they can turn headings into real
headings, add a TOC, perhaps a small index, perhaps
some tables, figures, and lists of tables & figures,
and things like title and author.
For a formatting test you want a really large document,
because some oddities don't happen all that often.
For example, some word processors will happily
put a heading at the bottom of the page sometimes.
LyX and Latex won't do that, but you need quite a few pages
for it to happen by accident. You can increase chances by
setting up for a small format like A5 or A6 or other custom
small paper. I believe that the word user will have to
go through the document carefully looking for such things,
while latex simply avoids them.
And when they are done, ask them to change the margins
a bit and resubmit the PDF. See how much time that takes . . .
Look both at the time invested, and the quality of final
results.
I welcome any comments about this. Again, my intent is to
have this be a contribution to the lyx project.
I hope you find some of the ideas useful.
Good luck with your contribution!
Helge Hafting
