Awesome Pairs

[freemind]

Hi,

Saw this blog post : 
http://www.proli.net/2012/05/25/pairs-is-finally-in-kde-edu/ - and 
thought of giving my feedback on the UI design.

Some issues, for me at least, that i found were:

*Players' panel should include the "join" panel, since they're correlated.

*A delete icon with no text is confusing, specially if it means to quit 
the application.

*It's not intuitive to get back to the previous menu/screen when you 
press the Info button.

*There should be some kind of visual clue in the "game panel", that 
showed that the last row is a subgroup of the first row. Otherwise it 
appears that each icon is a different type of game.

*The gameplay for multi-player seems nonsensical if it's meant to be 
played on the same computer/device. A better way to do it would be to 
let each player finish the entire game and then a chronometer would 
count the amount of time each player took and the one with lesser time 
would win.

*Perhaps changing the background to something more colorful would be better.

*There should be a way to pause the game while it's running.

*The delete icon for the player should appear on mouse click instead of 
mouse hover, so it can work on touch devices as well.

I understand that some things i pointed out are more technical bugs  
than actual UI design issues. But just in case i put them there.

My suggestion is to change the game menu into a typical game menu. What 
i mean by typical is that at first we have the menu with options like 
Play, Scores, Get themes, About, etc. Each option, when clicked, would 
then show a new group of options (clearing the previous ones out, 
obviously). This leaves bigger space for the game icons for example, 
which is a good thing if we're on a touch device with a small screen.

I also made some mock-ups, let me know what you think...

http://wstaw.org/m/2012/05/28/pairs2.png

It lacks many images (laziness), but i think you get the general idea.