[Usability] Deja Dup UI Review

[Michael Terry <mike mterry name>]

Hello, usability list!  I'm writing to request the favor of a UI
review for my pet project Deja Dup [1].  It is a GNOME-based backup
utility (and is being proposed as a Desktop module for GNOME 3.0).  I
believe such requests are in scope for this list?  If not, sorry for
being so cheeky.

Basically, I've just made up the existing UI but with an eye for
making the experience very simple.  Reducing hurdles to starting a
regular backup plan, because far too many people don't backup even
when they know they should, just out of laziness.  See
http://live.gnome.org/DejaDup/Mission for particular details about
what I'm aiming for.

You can see some quick screenshots here:
http://live.gnome.org/DejaDup/Screenshots.  And you can use jhbuild to
test it, or install the latest stable version in Fedora 13 or Ubuntu
Lucid (or on Karmic from the project PPA [2]).

Matthias already did a bit of a review in the module-proposal thread,
and I'll include his comments at the bottom of this email [3].  I
would argue a bit with his first item, but mostly agree with others.

Above and beyond a review of how the current UI could be
improved/redesigned, I'd like thoughts on a feature request I keep
getting.  Basically, people want backup profiles (being able to backup
potentially different data to different locations on different
schedules).  I've been struggling with how to offer such functionality
without making the UI much busier/complicated and would love
suggestions.

-mt

[1] https://launchpad.net/deja-dup

[2] https://launchpad.net/~deja-dup-team/+archive/ppa

[3]
- Could have a better first-time screen than just two big buttons.
Maybe just ask the user what he wants to backup if no locations have
been configured yet... The entire question of initial setup and
assisting the user with setting up a reasonable backup configuration
is an interesting one that seems to be left out so far.

- With a UI consisting just of two big buttons, the main window should
not be resizable, since huge buttons look odd. In the same vein, the
assistant windows should probably not be resizable.

- The main window should not pop in and out as the two assistants are shown.

- The button labels should probably have ellipses to indicate that
there is a dialog coming up. Otherwise, people might be scared to
click the Restore button, thinking that it might directly start a
possibly destructive action.

- When the restore is actually happening, it should warn me about
overwriting files. It should also tell me what locations will be
restored, before starting it, and ideally allow me to selectively
restore.

- The nautilus extension should only offer to restore files that are
actually present in the backup

- When restoring a single file (in nautilus), the success message at
the end should not talk about 'files' - ngettext...

- It would be good if the nautilus extension also allowed to add a
location to the set of backup locations.

- Identifying backups by date is ok, but it would be nice to make that
a little less detailed. If there is only one backup from March 10, it
would suffice to identify it as 'Today' or 'March 10', not the full
'Wed 10 Mar 2010 03:26:55 PM EST"

- If the 'Include from:' list in the Backup assistant is long enough
to break over several lines, the window has size issues, the 'Except
for:' line gets cut off. In the same dialog, an empty 'Except for:'
line should probably just be hidden.

- The Details expander in the progress page needs to enlarge the
window to a reasonable size. It is somewhat tricky to get that right,
but I have code to do it somewhere...