Welcome dialog prevents immediate use of application

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 24.10.2012 13:27, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>> The most important points are:
>>
>> * Non-modal (although plenty of functionality may be unavailable until the
>> user engages with the dialog)

I'm not even really sure that's necessary if it's really easy to find the "Empty 
document" option(s). If that one is really prominent, users can just easily 
click it and the dialog goes away.
Currently I see two problems:
1. The blank page / empty document selection isn't prominent enough, so users 
have to actively look for it
2. After clicking it, users have to find and click "Use this template", an 
unnecessary step

>> * Colourful: we want to avoid overworking the logic, reading, information
>> processing, etc... part of the user's brain: plenty of large recognisable
>> images make it more engaging.

It should be somewhat visually consistent with the rest of the application, but 
I agree that appearance is very important for a first impression, and the 
current dialog is definitely very poor in this regard.
For me, a welcome screen is the perfect place for using QML. Nuno Pinheiro 
talked about his work on a QML welcome screen for k3b last year. I don't know 
what the current status of that is, but what he described sounded pretty cool.

There shouldn't be too much eyecandy that gets in the ways of accomplishing the 
dialog's task, but a good first impression definitely does go a long way towards 
a good user experience.

> I had forgotten yet another welcome screen we've created, the one for Krita
> Sketch: http://www.valdyas.org/~boud/krita_sketch_start.png.

I really like that one! It might be a bit too colorful for other Calligra apps, 
but it looks really sleek and professional. Who did this? That person should 
definitely work on the welcome screen!

> And then there's calligra active with a nepomuk-based start screen.

Yes, but that was optimized for a viewer. Using Nepomuk for "recent documents" 
stuff should be considered, though.

To conclude: Yes, the current welcome screen is rather unpleasant (even though 
it did not cause any real usability troubles in the tests). However, I don't 
think it needs "polish", it needs to be re-done from the ground up. And that's 
out of scope for the week of polish.
So my suggestion is to make this a priority for the next iteration, if we can 
get a designer to work on it.