On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Matthew Toseland <t...@amphibian.dyndns.org > wrote:
> Right, so there are two possible approaches: > 1) Break Freenet, make a small part of its functionality perfect, leave the > rest as ugly, unmaintained and user hostile, and sacrifice the practical > usability of Freenet for a great number of the people who most need it for a > larger number of much more casual users who are far less likely to stay or > to contribute. > 2) Improve the existing interface in a gradual manner. Change the look and > feel as appropriate, rewrite the more important pages, introduce new > interactivity elements. > > IMHO the latter is far preferable. > The latter is likely to be *far* more work, is unlikely to succeed. Good UIs are designed starting from the user's needs, and working backwards. Freenet's current UI has been designed starting with freenet's current architecture and working forward. It is immensely difficult to transform the latter into the former incrementally and end up with a good result. A fresh start is required that follows a coherent and consistent UI philosophy from day one. You should view this as analogous to the Freenet redesign we did with 0.7. Just as we couldn't have done that incrementally because the issues with 0.6 were fundamental, the same is true of the UI. > Nothing requires GWT, it could all be done in Javascript. GWT makes > > development much faster and easier though. > > Nothing in the PDF even requires Javascript. Updating it dynamically > requires GWT, but the drop-down only requires CSS. > As I've said before, the PDF is far from comprehensive. > As I see it the main things we need help with are: > - Making it look good: Building a good look and feel, and a more > approachable structure if appropriate. > UIs are not about pretty pictures, any more than a car is about what color its painted. > And before you say I'm a developer, I don't know anything about UI, IMHO > that is the wrong attitude. Most UI is created by developers, and we need to > improve our skills at it. We've had almost a decade to test our UI skills with Freenet, the result is the mess we have today. We need a fresh perspective, and a fresh perspective inherently means that we can't do it piecemeal. > And on the whole there are basic principles which are not so hard to grasp, > such as looking at it from the user's point of view, de-junking, and so on. > Dieppe posted a page about that a while back. > Understanding and applying are two different things. Ian. -- Ian Clarke CEO, SenseArray Email: i...@sensearray.com Ph: +1 512 422 3588
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