On Jan 4, 2008, at 9:30 PM, daniel g. siegel wrote: > ... > while the ui of cheese gets described as quite good by some and as > pretty bad by others, i would like to discuss the ui and usability of > cheese and even enhance it to be full HIG compatible. i am not a > usability expert and the ui of cheese was done step by step without > even thinking about people with handicaps or other usability features. > therefore it would be very nice if some of you could post their opinion > about cheese and what we could do better. > ...
Cheese looks like a cool app! I'll add a few belated comments to those others have already made. I tried Cheese 2.21.5 in Ubuntu Hardy. Launching Cheese twice produced two Cheese windows. I don't think this should happen -- unless Cheese can handle multiple cameras, in which case each instance should automatically choose a different camera. Since I have no camera on my laptop at all, launching it a second time should have just focused the first instance. I was expecting Cheese to notice that I had no camera, but it doesn't. Instead, it shows me a test pattern -- and not even a static one, but one with animated snow in the bottom right corner. This is ugly. Instead, I suggest leaving the preview area grey, with "No camera detected." or similar text centered in the middle (and ideally also a button for installing or troubleshooting camera setup). Minimizing then unminimizing the Cheese window causes the test pattern to disappear, though it reappears when I click "Start recording". This seems like a bug, though it's moot if you kill the test pattern altogether. Both the preview area and the gallery area have no border, which is unrealistic. They should have bevel borders to make them look inset. Buttons and menu items should use Title Case: "Take a photo" should be "Take a Photo" (both in the button and in the menu), "Start recording" should be "Start Recording", "Stop recording" should be "Stop Recording", and "Move all to Trash" should be "Move All to Trash". Recording for ten seconds, then clicking "Stop recording", caused Cheese to hang. (I stopped waiting and put Cheese out of its misery after four minutes.) I don't know whether this was a side-effect of not having a camera attached, or whether Cheese was waiting for some intensive video conversion that should have been done in the background instead. I agree with Alan that the first menu would be better as "File" -- it should be for Filing the overall objects that the application deals with, which in this case is photos and videos. For example, I'd expect to see "Print..." and "Send by E-mail..." items in this menu. I wouldn't expect "Photo" or "Video" in this menu, because they're modes rather than filing actions. I like your suggestion of having "Take Photo" and "Record" buttons visible simultaneously, because that avoids the modes altogether. In the "Edit" menu I expected, but didn't find, a "Copy" item to copy the selected photo to the clipboard; and a "Select All" item, to select all the photos and videos. I did not expect to find "Effects", because that's not an editing operation. The "Effects" button claims to have the "E" access key, but this actually opens the "Edit" menu. "Back" is a weird way of navigating between the Effects pane and the preview pane. If it's practical to show a live preview of all the effects (they could have a much slower framerate than the full preview, if necessary), you could make these panes explicit, using "Preview" and "Effects" tabs. Otherwise, I agree with Calum's suggestion of using a sidebar for the effects (though I'd put it on the right, rather than the left, so it can appear and disappear without the preview having to move). Which effects are in use could be shown more explicitly using a checkbox near the top left corner of each -- though this might make people slower, if they think they have to click the small checkbox instead of clicking anywhere in the effect box. Perhaps use just a checkmark, not a checkbox. I agree with Calum's point that trashing a photo/recording should not produce a confirmation alert, like it doesn't in Nautilus. (This alert is worse in Cheese than it would be in Nautilus, because the photos and videos do not have visible filenames. So when I'm asked "Are you sure you want to move "0003.ogg" to the trash?", I have no idea what "0003.ogg" is!) The flash effect when taking a photo is neat, but the new photo appears in the gallery area with no visual explanation. Ideally, the picture would visibly zoom down from the preview area into the gallery. After taking three photos, I tried to drag a box across two of them (starting outside both) to select them for deletion, like I can in Nautilus, but this didn't work. Shift+clicking didn't work for adding to the selection either. When I drag a photo from Cheese to the desktop, it doesn't appear where I dropped it. Instead it ends up at the top left corner of the desktop, which is right under the Cheese window, so I can't see it. It looks like the drag and drop didn't work at all! I don't know whether this is Nautilus's fault or Cheese's fault, but either way, it needs fixing. I think "2008-02-02 11:20 PM (2)" would be a more useful default filename than "0003.jpg". (It would be redundant if Cheese was running on a filesystem that stores creation date separately from modification date, but usually it won't be.) Cheers -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
