Usability Review of OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

[Thomas Wood]

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 16:26 +1100, Carsten Haitzler wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:27:35 +0000 Thomas Wood <thomas at openedhand.com> babbled:
[...]
> > We only spent one day in the office designing these applications,
> > because at the time they were only going to be proof of concept ideas.
> > Therefore, we need to revisit the design, find the mistakes and work on
> > improving usability. 
> 
> fair enough. no idea how long u spent on them to start with.

As I said, we didn't spend more than a day on the designs as they were
only proof of concept at the time.

[...]
> >
> > * Add a running indicator and a close button to items in the application
> > list if they are running. This is really a work around  as we do not
> > have proper session management yet, but it is nicer than having two
> > separate lists for applications.
> 
> this sounds nice - though i don't think this is a major issue. i'd put this at
> the end of things to do :) i don't think a list of running apps is bad. as such
> i would advocate a close button or menu item on the title region. as long as u
> can run multiple apps having a quick way to close it is important. the list of
> running apps imho is fine. an extra indicator in the apps list as to if its
> running is of course very useful

Originally we did have a close button in the titlebar, but it was too
difficult to hit without a stylus, plus it took up a lot of room next to
the status icons and made the titlebar too crowded. But I agree this
change is probably not top priority.


> 
> > Contacts Application
> > --------------------
[...]
> > * Add groups button to toolbar in details page
> 
> moot really i think. groups are a feature i'd leave out for now.

I was actually also going to suggest leaving groups out, but I went to
ask someone if they thought it was even a useful feature and they said
it was (in fact, they used it themselves).

> 
> > * Remove communication history page(?)
> 
> probably useless for now - good in principle, but lets get core stuff seamless
> first. so agree.

Seems to me this is more useful on the Dialer app, but other people seem
to disagree.

> contact details just need a "call", "sms", "edit" and "delete" button. maybe
> moving to text labels from icons overall will help a lot. the icons tend to be
> very non-intuitive as to what they do. as a quick measure for now - just back
> to labels.

This is another thing I thought of but forgot to mention. Moving to text
labels would certainly help with some of the less obvious icons. We
would have to make sure all the applications were properly translatable.
I think it's definitely worth trying out this option (GKT+ has certain
options to choose icons, text or both in toolbars).


> 
> > Status bar
> > ----------
[...]
> > I'd like to suggest adding a bar at the bottom of the screen that is
> > divided equally into three or less buttons. One of these buttons would
> > be used for taking the user back to the home screen.
> 
> ok - other than using more screen space i don't mind the idea. makes sense. as
> i mentioned above - a close in the menu would be good

I think applications themselves don't make the best use of screen estate
at this point. If we can improve that then adding an extra bar wouldn't
be such an issue.

[...]
> > Theme
> > -----
> > 
> > The biggest problem with the current theme is performance. The main
> > issue here is the use of gradients which requires either stretching
> > images or dithering (for 16bit display). Both these are a significant
> > performance hit, so I would like to suggest redesigning the theme to be
> > faster and more efficient.
> 
> yes. just go for a solid color. lets make it simple and decide on fancy later
> when glamo accel is more fully done.

Great, all we need is an artist to design something nice with these
requirements :-)


Regards,

Thomas

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