Welcome dialog prevents immediate use of application

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Am Mittwoch, 24. Oktober 2012, 11:28:19 schrieb Paul Gideon Dann:
> On Wednesday 24 Oct 2012 12:05:00 Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> > The discussions about the template icons is just as old: the problem is
> > that nobody creates templates with good icons for Words or Sheets -- not
> > the kind of gorgeous templates that exist for iWork --
> > http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/#easy.

(Also the thumbnail generators of at least Words & Sheets still need to be 
fixed :/ for those documents created in Words & Sheets), to get nice previews, 
so the need for beautiful icons is reduced.

> Yes, of course that's a serious problem across most open source projects. 
> We need more graphic designers generally.  But if enough noise were made
> about this, I think people would step up to help.
> 
> > And then there's the problem that we tried to have one common gui paradigm
> > for very different applications. That's broken already with the toolbox
> > changes in words, of course. For some applications, a welcome screen is
> > really necessary because there just doesn't exist a useful blank document
> > (stage, krita -- see also the welcome dialog for loimpress, or the
> > discussion about the default screen l&f for gimp).
> 
> Yeah, that's fair enough.  Some applications may need some kind of mode
> selection before they can really start.  I feel it's important in this case
> that the screen appears in the already-open application, to at least give a
> feeling that the big featureful application is there waiting for you, rather
> than feeling as though the dialog is all there is.  For instance, consider
> QtCreator's welcome screen: colourful, reassuring, friendly, non-modal.
> > When a finnish usability group investigated calligra, it actually found
> > that users didn't have a problem with the welcome screen -- many
> > developers feel it is horrible, and that it _must_ be bad usability, but
> > that's actually not borne out by the research.
> 
> That is interesting; I'd be interested in hearing exactly how they tested
> this.
> 
> > > More importantly, though, the dialog presents me with an immediate
> > > feeling
> > > of frustration: "I just want to *play* with this application; why won't
> > > it let me in?"
> > 
> > Well, that's another thing: you want to *play* with the application, the
> > screen is designed for people who want *work* with the application.
> 
> I understand your reaction, but I believe play is an important part of
> discovery.  If an application is not fun to play with, users will not try to
> discover its features, and ultimately will find it a chore to use.
> > But that would actually mean extra steps for a user who wants to do work.
> > Like currently with lowriter, where you start the application, get a more
> > or less useless default document, then go new/Templates and Documents to
> > select a template. The result is that most people I know load an old
> > document that was created with the right template, remove the content,
> > type new content -- and then if recording is on, there's an information
> > leak.
> 
> You make a good point here.  However, I was thinking of something a bit more
> prominent, such as a landing page in a sidebar saying "Choose your
> template", looking something like this: http://ur1.ca/amoz2.  The key is to
> avoid modal dialogs.  If possible, I'd prefer to see the dialog embedded
> somewhere prominent, but where the user can still choose to ignore it (or
> easily dismiss it) if he doesn't want to think about templates and
> suchlike.  Not necessarily easy to implement, but something like this would
> get in the way of the user less.

In general I like the work-flow oriented approach as currently done in 
Calligra. But you, Paul, also have a point if you mention that there is a 
getting-to-know phase where other things then work-flow are also important
(it could also e.g. help journalists who are just giving that new release a 
quick testing, before they rant on it ;) ).

Perhaps that could be fixed by having some first-time screen which takes the 
user by the hand, introducing her/him shortly to the general idea of the UI 
and perhaps allowing to select one from multiple full-featured document 
(possibly from the Calligra server, so updates/extensions are possible without 
adding stuff in sources/packages), so there is something impressive to see and 
play with. That screen should be done with a plugin, so not everyone is forced 
to have it installed all the time.

BTW, two things I am working on to improve the user experience which are 
related to this:

* hopefully soon I will take the time to complete my patch to show/offer also 
template collections for LibreOffice/OpenOffice in the template selector, so 
there should be many more templates to see (in the long run I hope for a 
standard location/way to store templates, shared by all ODF programs).

* my SoK student is working on an Plasma applet to create new documents from 
templates directly from the workspace and having them opened ready for editing 
by the assigned editor (for the SoK project limited to LibreOffice). That is a 
reduced implementation of the whole idea to have global "New document..." 
menus, like described here:
http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2012/Ideas#Project:_Global_.22New_document....22_menu

So those who prefer to end up which a simple blank sheet on the start of the 
program one day would just need to add an element to the workspace (button or 
start menu entry) which creates a new document from the simple blank template 
and opens this.

Cheers
Friedrich