Re: [Usability] Questions for the UI Gurus (BibShelf Book Organizer)

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Samuel Abels wrote:

> Date: Sat, 07 Aug 2004 17:07:52 +0200
> From: Samuel Abels <newsgroups debain org>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] Questions for the UI Gurus (BibShelf Book Organizer)
>
> Hello,
>
> I am developing a book organizer application which currently covers very
> basic operations only. (btw., yes, I know about Alexandria, but I was
> personally not completely happy with it's user interface and the
> dependency agains a script interpreter.)

I'm not a guru, not a professional but that beauty of open source is that
you do not need to be and that applies to usability as well as
programming.

I can spell the word usability correctly, which is always a good sign!

I have read a few books, studied a little about usability in university
"I dont know Art but I know what I like"

Hopefully I can make some suggestions that might be helpful

> The project homepage is here:
>
> http://www.debain.org/?site=2&project=20&cat=58
>
> It was not hard to create an easy-to-use interface, because I mostly
> just copied it from muine:
>
> http://www.debain.org/stuff/mainwindow.png
> http://www.debain.org/stuff/editor.png

Bam!  Straight away I have issues based only on the screenshots.  I should
compile a list (actually I started, where did I put it?), I keep seeing
these things comes up.

mainwindow:

You have a menubar, use it!

Think about it, there has to be more things that would benefit from
having menu items.  (Look to standard items first.)
How about and Edit menu?  Undo, Redo maybe? Cut, Copy, Paste, probably!
View, Sort by Author, by ...
(and how about some applications specific items?)
Book menu, Add Book, Delete Book, Book Details?

There are only examples, I encourage you to think further and look at
other software (besides Muine) that performs a similar task to yours.

I cannot think of a good reason to ever have an application with as few as
2 top level menus and I would expect most Gnome applications to have at
least the four File, Edit, View, Help and probably one other application
specific top level menu.  Look at all the other software you use, you can
learn a lot from it.

Using your application without the mouse for a while will help suggest
ways to improve the menus and shortcuts.



A suspicous row of buttons, that should make you think Toolbar.
Using your application without the keyboard will help you think of
buttons you might like to add for some of the most frequent actions.

You do not seem to be using the title bar for anything, it might be useful
to put some information there.

editor window

Not only does '...' provide an uninformative lable it is also small
target.  It should probably be labelled 'Browse...' (or something along
those lines).

The summary and review look a bit cramped, does the editor window
Maximize? (same question for the main window?)
I first learnt to design interfaces from web pages so I really value a
user interface that scales/resizes and properly reflows.

> Any comments?

I'll try and address your other suggestions later if I have time.
Hope the above suggestions are helpful.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/