Usability Review of OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

Thomas Wood thomas at openedhand.com
Mon Mar 10 14:27:35 CET 2008


I've been thinking about the usability of the GTK+ based OpenMoko
applications and I have come up with some suggestions I'd like to
implement.

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. 

These are just a few ideas I've come up with so far. Some of them are
more work than others, but I think they would all help improve
usability.


Today Application
-----------------

The current "today" application has three pages. A summary screen, an
application list and a running application list.

My suggestions are:

* Remove the running application list - this is a desktop paradigm that
has no place on an embedded device

* 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.


Contacts Application
--------------------

* Remove tabs from bottom and buttons from top of index page
* Switch to a contact details when list item is clicked
* Add groups button to toolbar in details page
* Remove communication history page(?)


Status bar
----------

The icons in the bar at the top of the screen should not be interactive,
as they are too small to use with a finger. This means all the top icons
should not respond to clicks and it should be used for displaying status
only.

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.

Application menus could be made accessible by either the left of the top
status bar (with appropriate indicator next to the application name), or
from an extra button in the bottom bar.


Keyboard
--------

They keyboard should only pop-up when a user explicitly requests it.
Usually this is most conveniently done by popping up the keyboard when a
user taps inside an entry field. Eventually it would also be nice to be
able to switch between different types of keyboard, but the multi-tap
should be enough for now.

If it is not possible to bring up the keyboard on entry tap, then it
should be enabled and disabled by a button in the bottom bar.


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.



These are just a couple of first thoughts, so I would like to discuss
them further.

Regards,

Thomas


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