UX Questions

There are a number of new features we are considering and have started to implement, that go beyond the initial UX design for the RIB application where we had professional review. This page is a place to collect issues we face where it seems like UX/usability expert review is in order, because of the potential for confusion and inconsistency to the user.

If you have good ideas about how to resolve these questions, the best place to share is probably our mailing list.

UX Questions

Major Issues

• Expose help for widgets and their properties
  • As we add more properties to widgets and make things more complex, there is more opportunity for the user to not understand what a given property field is for or how to use it. We should strive to make the property names and input methods as intuitive as possible (preferring checkboxes or dropdown lists to free text fields, for instance). But probably at some point we should add help, for example a page for each widget that would describe what it does, how it behaves, how it should be used, and document what each property does and what are valid values for it. It could potentially link to external documentation like the jQuery Mobile docs that are the source for most of the behaviors exposed. The question then becomes how to expose this help: as a help button in the property pane, a question mark icon next to each property, or make the property names clickable, etc?

Minor Issues

• How to expose contentEditable feature
  • Shane has been working to add a feature where text content in the design canvas is editable in place, rather than going to the property view. This can be a bit more intuitive and user-friendly. But a question is how to activate the editing; currently Shane has used double-click on text to start editing, because single-clicking means to select the widget; but normally we've shied away from ever using double-click for anything. Also, it's not clear how the user would discover that they can do that. Another possible option might be that once a widget is selected, hovering over text would highlight them some way, and at that point single-clicking the text would start editing. Anyway, we think it's okay to go ahead with the double-click implementation, but it could use some UX review.
• Delete with drag-and-drop
  • We allow you to add widgets to the canvas with drag and drop from the palette, it seems a little odd that there's no way to remove them with drag and drop. Thinking back to lots of apps we've used, it seems quite common though - you select and either use the Delete key or some delete button somewhere. Someone proposed providing a trash can icon where you can drop a widget to delete it, but essentially this seems like a Mac mechanism that hasn't really become the norm. So we're leaning against doing anything about this now.