Plasma_UX_improvement_project news

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Erik and Jana,

On Wednesday, May 16, 2012 19:54:42 J.K. Majeed wrote:
> Over the course of our school semester we have been assigned the task of
> helping the development of Plasma Active, a task that has been very
> intriguing and interesting for all of us. We are a student group of six
> members that have been asked to improve the Plasma Active user experience
> in any way that we could, and have focused on two main aspects of the
> framework, namely the keyboard and the internet browser.
> 
> 
> Please see details at:
> community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_UX_improvement_project
> 
> 
> Being able to work with a framework and a design that bases itself on such
> revolutionary principles in innovative software such as Plasma Active, we
> have had a lot of fun working on the project, and as the semester comes
> toward a close, we would like some feedback from KDE developers to help us
> realize the potential and approval (or disproval) of our work.
> 
> 
> Having produced design documents and simple prototypes to back our claims
> of what would be an improvement to an already groundbreaking framework; we
> would ask all interested developers to please give any feedback to us, so
> that we can build an even better project report for our final delivery.
> 
> We are somewhat delayed in our appeal to you all, as our deadline for this
> assignment is the 20th of May.
> 
> 
> Hopefully you have some time to look at our designs and ideas and give us
> your thoughts on what we did right or wrong. Are these designs something
> you would have liked to work with or help develop further? Would the
> designs fit in with the already innovative and intuitive designs that
> Plasma Active facilitate? Seeing developers embrace the ideas and for the
> benefit of the community would mean a lot to us.
> 
> 
> If this seems interesting to you, please reply with your thoughts on this.
> Any feedback is good feedback.

I've only quickly gone through the results of your research, and my first 
impression is that it is well done, pays good attention to understanding why 
we did things how we did them, and it also points out good starting points for 
improvements. My first thought is that at least some of these ideas will most 
likely find their way into a future Plasma Active release. So, good work! :)

I haven't had the time to read through all of it, so concentrated on the bits 
about the browser, first. Here's a few comments and questions that came up in 
me while reading:

- The "clear" button in the lineedit atop has already been fixed, it's not in 
  line with other clear buttons. Well spot that it reuses the same metaphore 
  as the adjacent stop button. (We did replace it for consistency, though, not 
  really because of that clash (which is still a valid concern.)

- For bookmarks, I'm actually using the star icon. I don't think it was 
  different in the past, so not sure where you got the "heart" from, maybe the 
  peak and launch bar, in the share-like-connect plasmoid? (In which case, I'd 
  argue that bookmarks is not equal to, but a subtask of "Like", hence the 
  different icons. Arguable, though, could probably be improved.

- Scrolling: we use flick scrolling in the webbrowser, the scrollbars are not 
  interactive at all. Therefore, I don't understand that concern.

- Tabs / second level: This is one of the things I purposefully avoided, let 
  me tell you why. In Plasma Active, we use a document-centric approach. 
  Documents (often equivalent to windows) are switched through the peak and 
  launch bar. Introducing browser tabs would make it rather application 
  centric. More importantly though, it would make navigation more complicated. 
  Why introduce an alternative way to switching "open documents" (webpages)? 
  We already have one. If your answer is "to separate different sets of 
  documents", my answer to that is "use activities, it's what they're there 
  for". I honestly think that browserstabs are a fundamentally broken concept, 
  trying to make up for workspaces that do a poor job in managing many open 
  documents. Nothing I'd like to transport into the new world.

There are a few comments, which I really don't understand. Could you post a 
screenshot of the browser, as you've investigated it? I have the gut feeling 
that we're not talking about the same thing. (No heart icon, browser has not 
zoom buttons, but you're talking about them, some more.)

Still digesting the rest of your document ... :)

> On behalf of the entire student group, I thank you in advance for your help
> and cooperation. Keep up the awesome jobs you are doing!
> 
> -         Erik Joramo & Jana Majeed (Students at NITH, Norwegian School of
> Information Technology)

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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