The life of an activity - Contour UI concept part I

[Marco Martin]

On Wednesday 01 June 2011, Fania Jöck wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Today I want to start the series of sharing our thoughts about the
> Contour User Interface Design. Its going to be about the big topics in
> Contour like Activities, Recommendations, Resources and Context and how
> they are represented in the screens.

thanks Fania :)

following are replies both on the ui side of things and actual technical 
implementation discussions, so i invite everyone to comment ;)

> So, today I want to write about the "life of an activity" to provide a
> bigger picture about activities in general. Activities are one on the
> central points in Contour. They are the stable part of the UI while
> recommendations, context and resources are dynamically changing over
> time and usage.
> Definitions for activities are:
> - Activities can be created or removed only by the user. The system can
> suggest new activities when the user drasticaly changes the way they
> normally use an activity. But the system will never create activities
> automatically.
> - There is always exactly one current activity.

+1

> So, the following elements are displayed on the Activity screen (see
> Contour_ActivityScreen.jpg for visual design):
> - Name of activity as title on top
> - Resources
> - Group boxes of resources (automatically created by the type of
> resources or a mixed and individualised group)
> - Widgets (active apps, etc)
> - Recommendations to resources (displayed in the context menu
> individually on each resource icon, see last Emails from notmart)
> - Recommendations in general in the recommendation overlay (highlight of
> the recommendation icon on the left)
> 
> The following interactions are possible on the activity screen:
> - SCROLLING: Within the boxes the user can scroll the list of resources;
> a small arrow appears if more resources are available in the box; also
> the number of resources on top of each box indicates how many elements
> it contains.
> - DRAGGING: rearranging and dragging boxes in different order might be
> helpful as well in supporting the user to create his own customized
> activity. Right now the system just adds more boxes and sorts them
> alphabetically. Also the different devices can display different amounts
> of boxes then, on the smartphone maybe a more linear order while on a
> bigger surface the boxes are arranged in multiple lines.

This will be quite useful.
a technical challenge is that it will need an independent storing for the 
customized ordering, different from whatever gets from nepomuk. for that i 
tought about storing boxes geometries as applets, but this might not be the 
best solution.

> - RENAMING: Renaming the boxes would be a nice feature as well, as the
> user could not only create type-boxes (grouped resources of the same
> type) but also individualized, mixed boxes

here we have two problems a good technical solution is needed (so would like 
opinions about them ;)

* proper user friendly translations of the type names that are coming from 
nepomuk, FileDataObject is not really it (and even those that are ok, like 
Email would need to be translated anyways) this nice name could arrive either 
for nepomuk or be translated elsewhere

* again, storing groups indipendently from Nepomuk (and/or storing mappings 
from original name-> user specified name) 

> - ZOOMING: After short usability testings, most users wanted to zoom in
> and out of the interface to get a bigger picture. This might be a nice
> and intuitive gesture to get in a short amount of time a bigger picture
> of the activity, orientate and zoom in again in the box you searched
> for. The details of the screen would change in this case: big view: only
> boxes with names - normal view: boxes with resource names and icons.

as said, after the poor reception of the zui in kde 4.0 i am not sure how much 
i believe in zoom interfaces, that was also due to a technical limitation... 
we can try to present a different, compact view however when the pinch gesture 
is done, where all boxes are minimized.

> - MINIMIZING: Another option to the zooming interface would be the
> possibility of minimizing the boxes, as seen in the UI Design example
> Screen (Contour_ActivityScreen.jpg). So the user can collapse the boxes
> so that only the title of the box is shown; maybe also the function
> "minimize all" or "maximize all" can help here to give a quick overview
> over the content of the activity.

the minimize all could be triggered by the pinch gesture

> 
> Adding new resources to the activity could be done in 2 different ways:
> first there could be an add button directly on top of every box or
> second there could be a general add-button.
> * Pro's for add button in every box:
> - direct correlation of the newly added resource to relevant box, so
> type of newly added resource is already clear
> * Con's for add button in every box:
> - a lot of call to actions on the screen
> - can be unintentionally be touched while reorganizing the boxes and
> dragging them around
> * Pro's for general add button:
> - only one element on the screen that supports that function, no
> duplicate call-to-actions
> * Con's for add button in every box:
> - the box to which the resource should be added, has somehow to be
> selected, for example by dragging the item directly into the box or by
> selecting the box-types by a list (in case if we support "mixed boxes",
> not only type-based boxes)
> 
> So, I would suggest to display just one big "add resource" Button on the
> top of each activity. Then we have to decide whether we let the user
> drag the resources into the desired box or if he chooses from a list
> somehow.

yes, add button in the title of every box as the design shows could be also 
pretty small and hard to hit..
i tought about a global search box, from there resources will be always be 
added to theyr type group, and then, reordered. (the search button could also 
appear just after a click on an add button, but would be a tap more..)

another way would be displaying search results in a list besides the normal 
activity view, then adding could be done with drag and drop.



Cheers,
Marco Martin