Feedback from a user's / usability engineer's perspective

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi all,
sorry for not having written anything for so long.

After getting a version of Plasma Active / Contour running on my Wetab which I 
was actually able to use all the basic functions on and playing around with it 
a bit, I think I'm ready for my first round of feedback. 

So, let's start with the positive things I noticed:

- The general UI concept of "drawers" works pretty well. It saves screen 
estate while still allowing relatively quick access to functionality (without 
reducing it to tiny elements that would be hard to touch).

- It's nice that pretty much everything is "swipeable" (meaning you can scroll 
by swiping). Even though it isn't necessary in every situation (i.e. if the 
screen isn't full anyway), it is still good to see that this interaction 
principle is available for all elements. There are no classic scrollbars 
except for the legacy windows.

- I was positively surprised when I tried the pinch gesture in the image 
viewer and saw that it worked :) Didn't have the time to get WiFi working 
though, so I don't know yet if it works in the browser as well. But I assume 
it does or at least will do for 1.0, right? ;)

Now for some things that felt like they could still be improved:

- Switching applications just feels too slow. The user has to pull the top 
drawer either all the way down and all the way up again - which takes quite 
some animation time to do, or pull it to the "application switcher position - 
which is pretty hard to do since in my experience, most of the time it doesn't 
"click into" that position. Even if that did work better, it would still be 
two actions which don't easily combine into one "flow" for an action that 
users might want to do pretty often in some situations.

The general idea of pulling down the panel doesn't seem too strange or 
problematic, it's just that we need to enable the user to switch applications 
with one continuous movement in order to make it feel less "cumbersome".

- Adding resources to an activity seems rather inflexible. The user needs more 
control over where to actually put the resource instead of the system adding 
it "somewhere".
Here's my suggestion for that: Instead of selecting a resource and then adding 
it using a button (which feels pretty "old-school" compared to the rest of the 
interface anyway), I think it would be much nicer to drag it to the activity. 
The problem we're facing here is: How do we present as many resources on the 
screen at the same time to select from as possible (so the user doesn't have 
to scroll too much) while showing the space to drop to at the same time?
Here's my idea on that (we'd have to actually try it out to see if it works, 
of course): When the user starts dragging a resource, fade the window out 
until she has placed the resource on the activity (or canceled the action by 
dropping it over the panel). Fade it in again automatically afterwards. This 
might feel strange because of all the animation going on, but it would allow 
to drag resources onto the activity one after another directly where the user 
wants them to be and without the need of an "add" button. If we find out that  
users usually don't want to add more than one resource at a time, we might 
even not fade the window in again after dropping (requiring the user to tap 
"add resource" again.

- Why is "add resource" and "configure activity" activated using a button? I'd 
say they should be done in a drawer as well to keep them consistent with the 
rest.

- I'm not sure if it's only in the Meego image, but at least here I just can't 
find a way to turn the darn thing off ;) In the end, I have to press the power 
button until it switches off or have to use Konsole with a USB keyboard 
('cause the virtual keyboard isn't shown for Konsole).

There is surely more to come, but these are the things that first came to my 
mind.

I hope you'll find my comments useful (or at least discussable).

Ragards,
Thomas