[Evolution-hackers] Appointment and Meeting Editors -- 2.0 Thoughts

[Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com>]

Hello everyone. 

For some time, I have been working to simplify the user interfaces of the appointment/meeting editors (collectively known as the "event editor"). With the upcoming release of Evolution 2.0, we have a great opportunity to bring those interfaces into compliance with the HIG, and to improve their overall usability. 

My goals for this work are: 

1. To make it simpler for the user to get an "at a glance" view of an event. 

2. To create a better match between the event editor UI and the other Evo editor interfaces. 

3. To create a better match between the event editor UI and the way that information about an event is displayed in the Calendar. 

4. To make the event editor completely compliant with the HIG and the Accessibility guidelines.

5. To emphasize recognition over recall in the user interface. That is, to increase the visibility of the user's options/possible actions, instead of relying on the user being able to remember where in a complex system of tabs a given choice is located. 

6. To create a better match between the language used in the real world, and the language used in the event editor.

7. To remove any extra or irrelevent information from the event editor, creating a more minimalist design.

With these goals in mind, I wrote a prototype of a new design for the event editor. I have taken some screenshots of it in action, and will use these to describe my proposal to you. 

Screenshots: 
1. The event editor, as started from the File->New menu:
http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/appt.png
As you can see, the overall number of tabs has been reduced from a max of 5 to a max of two. I adopted a design which is somewhat similar to a standard party invitation; the user is asked to specify where, when, what, and why an event involves. My hope is that this creates a better match between the info Evo is requesting, and a common object from the real world.

NB: The toolbar items shown here are placeholders more than anything else. I added them to express the idea that we could use a toolbar there to make common operations easily accessible.

2. The "Scheduling" tab of the appointment editor: http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/sched.png
I think that this tab should always be shown, regardless of whether an event is an appointment or a meeting; this eliminates the need to provide an appt <-> meeting switching mechanism. In the case of an appointment, only the user's schedule (if available) will be shown in the colorful-sliding-schedule-pane. If you were to zoom in on that pane (by pressing the "Zoom" toggle), then it would look like this: http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/sched_zoom.png

NB: The colors in the colorful-sliding-schedule-pane look rather poor because I hacked them up in the gimp. In reality, we'd probably continue to use the same color scheme as we've been using.

3. The dialog used to specify recurrence:
http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/recur.png
This dialog is launched by pressing the repeat button in the "Repeat: Never" area of the appointment page. By making this a separate dialog, we accomplish two things: we don't force the user to switch notebook tabs when she specifies recurrence (hence obscuring all the data about the appointment that she has thus far provided) , and, we are allowed more flexibility wrt how we organize the recurrence settings (since they don't have to fit into the notebook structure of the event editor any more.)

When recurrence has been specified, the event editor looks like this: 
http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/appt_recur_and_alarm.png

4. The dialog used to specify alarm settings:
http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/alarm.png
This dialog is launched in the same manner as the recurrence dialog. I believe that separating alarm options into their own dialog has the same basic benefits as moving the recurrence options. 

When alarms have been specified, the event editor looks like this (deja vu): 
http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/appt_recur_and_alarm.png . 

5. The mechanism (or something approaching it) for selecting which calendar to add an event to:
http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/select.png
This is launched by pressing the [...] button next to the "Calendars" entry, if the desired calendar is not in the entry's history. This dialog is optional.

So. What are your reactions to this work? What other information do you need from me to consider this design? For what it is worth, I started from scratch and had little problem writing this gui -- I don't think that for an experience hacker, making these changes would be very difficult, at all. 

Thanks,
Anna


ps. Just FYI, the next steps for me are: 

* Incorporate feedback from you guys, and refine the design based on issues you raise (and on resource-allocation information from Christine and Ettore.)

* Create a functional specification for this design as I did for the list view in the calendar.

--
Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com>