Usability Meeting at Fosdem re review:103811

[David Edmundson]

We had a meeting at FOSDEM re
https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/103811/ with a guy from
open-usability. Notes taken are written below, with additional
comments.

People present:
 - Me
 - DrDanz
 - Martin
 - DrDanz's girlfriend (sorry, my mind has gone blank :-S )
 - Some really nice guy from Open Usability (whose name I have no idea
how to spell.)

Summary of things discussed:
 - Window icon should not be specific to the current tab. It should
show if the window needs attention by the user, after which it should
fall back to a standard icon for the text-ui.

 - The icon should _not_ be the same as the contact list as that would
be confusing.

 - Tab icon should be one of message/typing/presence. (as if they're
typing you don't give need to know if they're "busy" as they're
clearly at their computer.)

 - Overlays are too small to be useful

 - Multi tab chats and single user chats should behave differently.

 - Window title in a multiple tab chat simply says "2n active chats"

 - Single window stays the same.

 - In order to do what was discussed the tab bar would have to stay visible.

 - One proposed suggestion was to have a new tab button that shows a
list of contacts.
(I am /massively/ against this, as it goes against the entire modular
approach we've been working towards)

 - Protocol does not need to be displayed in the window title/icon.
Maybe in the toolbar.
(especially when we have metacontacts, so it can be a dropdown.)

One of the things constantly repeated at the conference in the design
talk is there is no "right and wrong" design, only constant itteration
improving - This has different parts from both the arguments in the
original discussion, which shows progress.

I'm a teeny bit of a skeptic about all of these, as I never noticed
anything "wrong" with what was there before and I use chat a lot every
day, however, I'm willing to try the proposed out. We should monitor
feedback from actual users (including us) though as that's by far the
_most_ important factor in these decisions.

Dave