[Bf-taskforce25] Oulu Usability Report

[joe]

I tend to think the drop list is a little confusing to people, though;
it's not as clear as a real tab bar.

Joe

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 2:28 AM, Wahooney <wahooney at wahooney.net> wrote:
> An easier and more consistent solution to that is to have a drop list like
> in the dopesheet (The one that switches between Dopesheet, Action Editor,
> ShapeKey Editor) that switches between the various modes. It's also more
> consisrent with the other screens that can modify multiple aspects in a
> single screen.
>
> joe wrote:
>
> 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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