[Bf-committers] "Blender, an appraisal from a first time user"

[Xavier Thomas]

2016-01-06 7:08 GMT-02:00 Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org>:

> Hi,
>
> Thanks for the mockup. More people think that adding more info to the
> splash is helpful, but it clutters our UI more too. Next step is bigger and
> flashing notifiers to beg for attention?
>
> I believe we can do much better. For example - on first install the Splash
> can be nearly empty with a clear choice for "Copy my previous settings" and
> a new "Configure" that leads you to two or three steps to set the
> environment and defaults. In that flow can also include templates for quick
> out-of-the-box satisfaction.



Well every solution have is advantage and inconvenience. I was not so found
of mine because a lot of the first time users could miss it anyway. The
advantage was that is was simple and quick to test and lot of common app
that are used for a lot of purpose have some kind of similar selector, but
granted that they might no be the best example.

The solution you propose looks better and should permit to fix other issues
like the cache size being to small for video editing. However it would
probably require deeper thinking from the usability/UI team.

IMO this is the real issue from the original user complain, and much higher
priority than the tool-tips or error messages. This user wrote to give us
feedback about his experience but 1000's of other just closed Bldendr and
forgot about it. When I meet new people working in audiovisual and tell
them I mainly use Blender the most common reaction I have is: "Blender
seems great on paper, I wanted to test it, I downloaded it, launched it, I
got past the splash screen to the default screen, could not figure out
anything and quit"


Next step is bigger and flashing notifiers to beg for attention?
>

Not really, this "thinking about first time user" mentality is a first for
me, usually I am more egoistic and try to code things that affects me or my
projects. :)
On the usability/UI side I was thinking of "auto collapsible areas" and
"areas in tabs". My intention is to have, for example in the default screen
layout, the outliner area and properties area both using the full height of
the window and using the new UI tabs to switch between those. This would
reduce the time scrolling the UI drastically IMO.

Then set this area to auto-collapse (optionally) to just the width of the
tab when the mouse gets out, so we gain screen estate. The same mechanism
could be used to have both a timeline and a python console on the bottom of
the screen.