Awesome Pairs

[Anne-Marie Mahfouf]

On 05/28/2012 01:14 AM, freemind wrote:
> Hi,
Hi,

First thank you for testing Pairs and writing your suggestions and 
drawing mockups.
>
> 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.
Yes, I would click on it to stop the current game.
>
> *It's not intuitive to get back to the previous menu/screen when you 
> press the Info button.
Yes, I had trouble finding out a click would get me out
>
> *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.
>
I agree. We have the right pane full of icons and it's not that evident 
the 6 firsts are for choosing the type of game while the rest are for 
choosing the theme. There shoudl be a clearer separation between Types 
of games and Themes.
> *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.
When played in real life, a Memory game is played by kids one after 
another, they discover 2 cards then if they match, discover 2 again. If 
they do not match, the cards are turned back to be hidden. The aim is 
for them to remember the cards they turn and the cards other kids turn.
>
> *Perhaps changing the background to something more colorful would be 
> better.
>
> *There should be a way to pause the game while it's running.
Agree
>
> *The delete icon for the player should appear on mouse click instead 
> of mouse hover, so it can work on touch devices as well.
For touch screens we got another report with suggested improvements.

There's a bug currently in Pairs as you can suppress the existing 
player. Pairs should not allow to start playing without a player (the 
game looks for the last name entered if there is no player but that's 
not very intuitive)
>
> 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
>
We should conduct after 4.9 some usability tests with kids. Hopefully 
the KDE Usability Team will get strong again and could help.

Best regards,

Anne-Marie