Re: [Usability] New UI for gnome-about-me capplet

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

(I'm aiming for constructive criticism, sorry if it seems a bit harsh)

On Sun, 30 Apr 2006, Diego [ISO-8859-1] González wrote:

> Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2006 22:15:42 +0200
> From: "Diego [ISO-8859-1] González" <diego pemas net>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] New UI for gnome-about-me capplet
>
> hi
>
> i'm the maintainer of the gnome-about-me capplet that is in the control
> center, i'm thinking about redoing the UI for the new release of gnome.

I was looking at Ubunut and I noticed there were seperate items for the
Login picture and the About me picture.  If this isn't an Ubuntu only
thing have you given any thought to having About Me do both?

> Currently i have thought about something like the screenshot attached.

It does look a lot tidier.

Having space either side of the picture like that seems like a bit of
waste.  I'd prefer a slightly wider layout with the picture on the left
then the details beside it.

  ____
 |    |  Full Name  [                  ]
 |    |  Nickname   [                  ]
 |___ |


I'm assuming Full name  (First Name)+(Family Name) in whatever order
and nickname is autofilled with the system username/logname.

(Double barreled surnames are strange* but some cultures list their family
history in their family name so if you aren't going to split family name
and first name into seperate fields you'd want to leave a good amount of
space.)

Have you considered using the term "Web Page" rather than home page?  It
is a little more generic but home page implies some assumptions such as
having a personal homepage with something like a journal/blog and not all
users would necessarily want to have this which is why I prefer the
generic (it would be more useful for me to bookmark google since i use it
more often than my own journal).  I suppose it would depend where and when
this link is actually shown and how it can be used.

If I were on slashdot I might use 'insensative clod' cliche since not
everyone has a job (or cares enough about it to fill in that information)
and I'd be inclined to push that to seperate section (another tab, hide it
behind an expander or something) so as to keep the about me dialog
extremly simple with just the basics, although I'm sure there will be some
question of what are the most important basic details to include
(presumably email address goes elsewhere with more detailed contact
information).

> Clicking on the picture of the first screenshort would show a file
> selector in the $prefix/share/pixmap/faces directory.
>
> Clicking on the change password would bring the dialog shown in the
> second screenshot.

The dialog seems somewhat verbose.  The two step process of having to
authenticate and provide the new passwords seems convoluted.

I've recently been reconsidering the new password/confirm password user
interface.  I have seen how error prone this process can be and how much
difficulty many users have typing the same hidden text twice correctly.
Frankly I use cut and paste to bypass the annoyance of typing this twice
(and no I'm not impressed when applications try to prevent me from doing
this).  The alternative I have seen has been to include a checkbox which
allows you to [] Show Password but there may be other ways to show users
instantly the values do not match (and if I were trying to slap something
together using existing widgets I'd use the broken chain ratio constraint
widget to show this but there might be a better way).

I think it comes down to an ease of use versus security tradeoff we
might have to leave for another day but I do hope this dialog can be
substantially simplified, by both removing the need to hit an authenticate
button and providing realtime feedback and input checking to help users
type the same text twice.

> Clicking on the "Address book card" would show a dialog very simmilar to
> the current evolution "new contact" dialog.

Similar ... can the new contact dialog be hacked out of Evolution and
be directly reused by both?

> What do you think about this new UI? how can it be improved?

I very much appreciate your making the effort to improve the user inteface
and I hope you will consider my suggestions and that they will be of some
help to you.  Best of luck.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

P.S. Mispellings of Ubuntu were not intentional but it amuses me not to
correct them.