Yeah, we are definitely starting to suffer from clutter in the interface. I personally like packing as much as possible in, but I suspect I'm in the minority. I'd like to avoid too much customizability in the interface because then we become just another SAP or something with wayy too many features.
Right now my biggest cognitive cost on the interface is evaluating which tasks I can actually execute right now. That's my primary motivation for the defer buttons: get stuff off the screen so I can focus on what I can actually do. Next on my list is task dependencies, so you can have only the top task from a project showing, for example. I wonder if using alternating colors on the tasks or something else to separate them visually would help. On Oct 4, 2008, at 1:52 PM, Luis Villa wrote: > On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Eric Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: >> Yeah, I pushed that to trunk before I came up with good >> documentation. Those >> are defer buttons that will push the show_from date out by 1 and 7 >> days >> respectively. Would "Defer x days" be a descriptive enough alt text? > > Yup, that would definitely be an improvement. Ideally if the UI has > that information it shouldn't need to be documented at all (no one > reads the docs anyway ;) > > Note that generally I think each task line is really cluttered right > now- at this point every line in the table now has *9* pieces of > information associated with it: > > [delete] > [edit] > [star] > [complete] > [overdue?] > [title] > [project] > [defer 1 day] > [defer 7 days] > > Multiply that by a lot of tasks and that's a whole lot of information > in every screen. Having your eyes scan that much information every > time makes it harder to find the really important information- 'what > do I need to do next.' > > I'm afraid I don't have any great suggestions on how to simplify right > now- maybe put the less frequently used star/delete/defer buttons into > the edit box? But I'd definitely strongly recommend considering the > cognitive cost of all this clutter before adding anything more. > > Thanks again to everyone- trunk looks great, and I'm looking forward > to playing with calendar and the email code- > Luis > >> On Oct 4, 2008, at 1:14 PM, Luis Villa wrote: >> >>> Like I said in the other question, I just upgraded to latest master. >>> There are now [+1][+7] buttons next to every action, but they've got >>> no alt text so I have no idea what they do :) They also don't seem >>> to >>> work consistently- I clicked it on one overdue action and it sent it >>> to the tickler, and clicked on another and (AFAICT) it changed the >>> due >>> date instead. >>> >>> Can someone explain? :) >>> >>> Luis >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Tracks-discuss mailing list >>> [email protected] >>> http://lists.rousette.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/tracks-discuss >> >> _______________________________________________ Tracks-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rousette.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/tracks-discuss
