[Bf-taskforce25] Oulu Usability Report

[joe]

There was also a valid point about how switching between material,
texture and composite nodes in the node editor.  This seems pretty
obvious to me, heh, but I never thought of it; essentially we have a
tabbed editor, with the "tabs" being not-entirely-intuitive,
standalone icons (especially the composite icon confuses people).

I suggest we actually implement a real generic tab bar that could be
used by the node editor, the outliner, buttons window, etc, something
where it'd be really obvious what's going on.

Joe

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Wahooney <wahooney at wahooney.net> wrote:
> I just had a quick scan through the usability report written by the folks at
> the University of Oulu (get it here if you haven't seen it:
> http://tols17.oulu.fi/~tkorhonen/ukkoss3/images/usability_test_blender.pdf)
>
> They raise a few valid points in their findings and I'm kicking a few
> solutions around in my head:
>
> = Discoverability =
> I'm wondering if it wouldn't be to Blender's benefit to have some very short
> (~1 minute), professional looking (ie. common layout, format, etc. between
> vids), voice overed (possibly localised) videos explaining one small aspect
> of Blender to the user at a time (ala Maya & 3ds Max 2008+), these can
> either be downloaded from b.org (individually or in a package), viewed
> online or perhaps even packaged with a special Learner's/Noob's Edition of
> Blender. Of course, the vids can also be published on video sharing sites
> (youtube, vimeo, etc.), it won't hurt to teach more people about blender ;)
>
> Note: There shouldn't be too many of these videos initially, since they are
> only meant to teach the basics of Blender to the user, ie. Viewport
> Navigation, Window Managing, Translating objects, Editing Mesh Objects, etc.
> This isn't the place to be teaching people how to model a human head with
> rigging, hair and lip sync, unless someone out there can do all that under a
> minute :P
>
> == Hot Key Discoverability ==
> Bracketed hot keys in tooltips (generated from the key map) would probably
> be the easiest solution for this.
>
> OR
>
> Flash / HTML&Java / whatever file with a keyboard map, showing keys and
> their functions, again pulled from the keymap. I'm not quite sure how this
> will be done, since I don't even know how the key maps work at this point :P
> but I'm sure someone out there will be clued up enough to figure it out.
>
> = The Do Composite question =
> Do Composite was recently discussed on ML and there were suggestions to
> remove it altogether, I suggest that it be renamed to just plain Composite
> and be placed with the other rendering togglables (Shadows, SSS, EnvMap,
> Radio [which I believe is getting the chop] and Raytracing) in the
> misleadingly named, IMO, Shading tab in the Scene Panel and activated by
> default.
>
> Removal probably isn't the best idea, since there are cases where disabling
> compositing will be a handy ability.
>
> I hope this helps the design direction in some way, I know 2.5 isn't quite
> at the point where these issues are a priority, but hopefully some better
> ideas may be sparked by these suggestions.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Keith "Wahooney" Boshoff
>
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