new NM design: UI considerations

[Lamarque Vieira Souza]

Em Thursday 06 October 2011, Lukáš Tinkl escreveu:
> On Čt 6. října 2011 10:57:11 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > While reading Lamarque's blog at
> > 
> > http://lamarque-lvs.blogspot.com/2011/10/solid-sprint-day-3.html
> > 
> > a few things struck me. First, I think it's really good to see design
> > considerations of such a central part of the users' workflows. I
> > especially like the usecases you used. I'm not sure, however, that
> > everything we need it for has been considered, specifically touch-screen
> > friendliness seem to regres with the proposed design. Those are
> > UI-related things we considered when designing the two-paneled pop-up.
> > It seems they've not been taken into account when designing the current,
> > one-paneled view. The main issue I see with the proposed design is the
> > use of the context menu, which has some problems:

	Honestly, I do not see why using two panels helps with touch-screen. The 
left panel is basically a list of network interfaces, which in most cases are 
not needed.
 
> > * options in there are hard to discover, impossible for some users

	That was the intention. I moved the "Enable Networking" there because 
that option is almost useless when NM is working properly, I could even remove 
it completely and almost nobody would miss it. The "Show More" is 
controversial, I like it, I know how to use but there are people who do not. I 
plan to implement a suggestion from a comment in my blog where the last item 
in the connection list will be a button "Show more %d connections". The first 
time someone clicks on it it will show all available connections and change 
the text to "Show less connections" or something like that. I can even change 
the icon to a arrow down and arrow down when alternating between "Show More" 
and "Show Less", I think that works better than the current implementation.

> > * if you use both RMB and LMB on the panel icon, it gets confusing: just
> > 
> >   look at how nm-applet handles this, it's pretty bad, one always has to
> >   search for the options

	It is confusing in nm-applet because they splitted often used items 
between RMB and LMB. I plan to move only rarely used options to RMB.
 
> > * RMB doesn't work on touch-screens

	Is there any need to disable networking in touch-screens devices? If no, 
then there will be no problem moving "Enable Networking" to RMB.
 
> > So I understand that you moved those in the context menu because the main
> > UI becomes too big, too crowded. I do not think that it's an option,
> > however.

	I moved them to RMB because they are rarely used options and I did not 
want to remove options in this first iteration of usability changes. Usability 
speaking I could even just remove them all since "Penny" does not understand 
how to use them.
 
> > The NM plasmoid has been designed with use on touchscreens in mind, and
> > we're actually relying on it for Plasma Active (where there is no context
> > menu). Implementing these changes would basically make het Plasmoid
> > unusable for us, and we had to maintain a fork of the current version --
> > nobody wants that.

	I do not think the changes make is useless for Plasma Active. "Enable 
Networking" and "Show More" (this one defaulting to showing all available 
networks) are rarely used options, I could even remove the "Enable Networking" 
completely and it would still work in touch-screen devices. For the "Show 
More" button I like the suggestion I described above, it still works with 
touch-screen devices.

	Another change I did is moving the disconnect button to the connection 
list and increase its size. The current disconnect button is too tiny for 
touch-screen devices.
 
> > I suggest to wait with these UI changes until we've found good solutions
> > for them, and to not rush the redesign. It's maybe not the most elegant
> > thing in the world, but there's plenty of opportunity to improve the
> > workflow by polishing the flows through the QWidget-based parts. No need
> > to hurry here.

	I am already busy doing other changes in Plasma NM and from the 
beginning I did not want to change the GUI, but I am being pressed from 
everywhere change it.

> > Here's a proposal: As you know, I've started working on a QML-based
> > version of the NM Plasmoid. This should make it future-proof (wrt
> > Frameworks 5 and libplasma2), and solve many small layout problems
> > (GraphicsWidget's sizing is a lot more wonky than QML's layouts). I
> > suggest UI changes happen in there, and we do it in a way that works
> > both on desktop and touch. It's also way easier to experiment with
> > different layouts in QML than in C++. Furthermore, it's a lot easier to
> > make the UI more attractive and fluid by adding subtle transition
> > effects. Let's use this as starting point for the redesign of the main
> > panel, work on the QWidget-based pieces first. This will save us another
> > rewrite of the UI in the not-so-far future. Mid-term, we need to get rid
> > of QGraphicsWidgets anyway, which are heavily used in the current
> > Plasmoid.

	Are you talking about the QML version for branch nm08? It still needs to 
be ported to NM-0.9 and libnm-qt. That's too much work for just changing the 
GUI. The current re-write is more than 70% done, you should said that before 
we have reached this point. What you are saying is to drop everything we have 
done so far.

> That pretty much sums up my thoughts as well; what about we do all the
> intrusive UI redesign in a separate branch? I like some of the ideas but if
> we do it, we should really opt for QML and keep the mobile/touch
> limitations in mind.

	We do not have man power to develop several branches in parallel. We 
tried to do that with libnm-qt and in the end libnm-qt just stalled. The QML 
prototype in branch nm08 is also stalled. I do not want that happening again.

	QML is too much changes to be done now. Keep in mind that I and Ilia are 
not working in full dedication to Plasma NM, we have other obligations. Until 
more people step in to help with the big changes (not only with small fixes) 
things are going to progress slowly (but steadly) as it has been during the 
last year. QML is a big change and cannot be done in small steps like the 
plasmoid changes I am proposing.

	We already have a long list of things to fix and implement, we cannot 
add more things unless it is really necessary. As far as I know the old 
QWidget and QGraphicsWidget will work with Qt5, right? If so then there is no 
hurry to change to QML right now.

-- 
Lamarque V. Souza
http://www.geographicguide.com/brazil.htm
Linux User #57137 - http://counter.li.org/
http://planetkde.org/pt-br
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