Is our UI good or bad?

[IBBoard]

I just looked at our stats and noticed that a Russian forum is passing quite a few visitors our way. A quick dig around and I found this thread (translation via Google).

Some comments are quite good:

By the way, on the theme: stumbled upon a free open-sorsny analog AB WarFoundry , it might be reasonable to join the project, not ever sit still for ab 2.2 (especially true for those who want to builder on the tablet / bukah under Linux / android / osXom)

but others aren't so good:

Pros:
1) Porteybl, that is at work will open up.

Cons:
1) Inconvenient interface.
2) There is no way to save just a txt signature
3) It is incompatible with AB
etc.

The idea of ​​fun, but the interface killed her, the AB, even 2ki, it is much better. Simply, I think, from AB to porteybl and no steam.

Obviously, machine translation isn't perfect here. What I think they're saying, though, is that a native interface with proper widgets and a non-hideous appearance is difficult compared to AB. Huh?

Yeah, we don't do "plain text", just HTML, and we don't load AB files yet (I still think the main code has a higher priority) but is the UI really worse than the monstrosity that I see when I use AB?

[snowblizz]

In some respects yes. There are too many pop-up windows IMHO.

Struck me just the other day that if the unit picker eg was a drop-down menu we'd lose one "unnecessary" window. I think that is one thing, there's just so many different dialogs.

I've also found the equipment picker messy.
Have you looked at it with one of my datafiles loaded? There's so much equipment to choose from.
I'm not going to claim one way better than another, but if you are sort of used with AB's way then I totally get why WF's UI seems bad.

Basically you have to look at it like the user is a super-lazy idiot and design for that. I haven't bugged you with my UI questions though as I feel functionality comes first and we can later sort of decide what is actually good design. Doesn't matter how nifty the interface if is the functionality lacks, but obviously today a simple interface is really really important. IMHO at least.

[IBBoard]

The problem with drop-down menus are a) we can't add warnings (which were in an early build) to say "you won't be able to add this and comply with the rules", b) it is extra movement - I think submenus are generally considered as being bad and c) the toolbar buttons would be very messy. I agree that dialogs can be over-used, but I'm also still inclined to use them in cases where putting their functionality in-line would over-complicate the UI.

As for the equipment picker, would the tabbed version that was suggested on here help at all? I find the AB one messy because it puts everything in the list, where as we only show what you have (it's a combination of WH unit cards and just the old way that Rollcall did it).

I think we need to focus on UI issues as well as functionality. Unfortunately, it is a closely related pairing. You can have the best functionality in the world (e.g. Linux) but if people hit one little bump that they don't like or can't easily find it then they think the app is useless.

If someone wants to sketch up some UI alternatives then please feel free to post them. I will admit to having been influenced by the old Rollcall UI - in part because I used to use it and in part because the "unit card" metaphor makes sense to me. A WH-style roster is then available when you print/export, which means you get the roster when you need it and the individual units when you want to specifically focus on them. If that's not the way that the majority of people work then we'll have to find another way, though.

[clutch110]

So I redownloaded Warfoundry to give it a try after I finished checking out BattleScribe. I took a long time to ponder the pros and cons of your UI. BattleScribe adheres to the tree view with the sources on the left and the roster composition on the right. I think this is an excellent formula and even Army Builder does something similar. You have the current roster composition on the right but it feels out of place as a floating window.

Warfoundry took me a while to figure out how to add a unit. Sure you have nice big plus signs along the top with every type of class available but this is actually confusing. It ends up being clutter. If you want to stick with a dialog based interface then have a toolbar item, Add a Unit and then present a tree for navigation.

Adding equipment is a little confusing. This interface is closer to the standard AB interface of adding troops. Again, I think having a tree view with an options pane on the right to increase the number of units or whatever is a good idea.

Finally, the HTML output is just featureless. It would be nice to supply raw XML so the user can transform it or allow custom stylesheets to be applied to the XML output.

[IBBoard]

Thanks for taking the time to ponder the differences I'm always willing to listen to constructive criticism and take people's ideas on-board.

Interesting comment on the unit adding style - I'd find that kind of interface too noisy. Why do I need to see all of the available units when I'm editing stats and equipment? Ditto for the equipment - they're showing everything at once. Also, BattleScribe has too much padding for my tastes, leaving insufficient space for the useful detail To each his own, I guess!

I did look at letting users dock the floating window, but it was a bit of a pain at the time and a bit brittle. I can investigate again if it is better for people, but I think I just picked up the floating panel idea from Rollcall.

I'll try an alternate UI for adding units and having a single "add" button with categories in a tree. I might even be able to put it as optional in the preferences so that people can swap and choose.

I agree that the equipment selection may not be ideal, but it can be quite complex to handle all of the allowances and prohibited combinations, so keeping it in dialogs seemed the best idea. We had a suggestion for a tabbed interface lying around somewhere, but I can't find it right now.

We already have a form of plain XML - the .army files They're limited, though, and don't include stats. I'm sure I could make a simple format in a few hours. As for the HTML being basic, that was the intention. It is just a quick way of getting the output available in a format that can be printed.

If someone wants to do some other output formats (XML, PDF, styled HTML, battle cards, etc) then it'd make a great little project for a plugin or contribution and should only need a class or two to be created (although anything that needs UI to ask the user questions would be a bit hard to do cross-platform)

[clutch110]

I had to put a lot of thought into why the tree view works well for me. Here is why I value a tree view, references. When I am thinking about a unit it usually doesn't involve just one unit. If I add A I will want to compliment with B. The rigidity of your current system doesn't easily allow this.

BattleScribe does have a lot of padding and the output doesn't include unit stats. This is a big killer feature that I enjoy.

Finally, for the output, well I don't know a lot of C# but maybe I can learn enough to cobble together an output plugin. Unlike BattleScribe I have access to the code and I can contribute.

Thanks again for the consideration and the openness to suggestions. I would love to see Warfoundry grow feature competitive against the likes of your commercial competition.

Dan Kulinski

[IBBoard]

The HTML output (which is actually XHTML, because I build it as proper XML using the HTML namespace) is this file. It is 400 lines, including all headers and whitespace. Most of that is just helper methods to break things out into small, manageable chunks. All you really need to do is implement a single interface with one method.

As for tree views, I can kinda see what you mean with having context - I guess it works a bit better when you're not using a dialog. Maybe I'll have a toggleable panel with a tree in and keep the buttons, so people have options. I didn't see there being a problem with adding units from different categories, but if it spoils user flow then we can investigate the alternatives. The dev is always more familiar with the app and sees fewer issues than the user!

Thanks for the support on the openness front. Hopefully we can get more people on-board and make a good push against the competition

[clutch110]

I'll definitely dive into that this weekend. I have too many things going on this week to take a look at it now. Hopefully I can come up with something quickly.

Clutch

[IBBoard]

No problem - all help is appreciated. If anyone wants to mock up UIs for discussion then that would be equally appreciated as pictures speak a thousand words

[IBBoard]

I've been working on having a tree in a dialog that has all of the available unit types. It is always available for now, just so we keep the two UI options available, but it is in my dev fork at http://dev.ibboard.co.uk/repos/IBDev-IB ... ms/summary.

Hopefully it captures some of what you were thinking, although I think the loss of the warning before you add an invalid unit detracts from the tree option a little.

[IBBoard]

For reference, here's what it looks like for now (you can also double-click on units, but that's not very screenshottable!)

[img]http://warfoundry.co.uk/images/development/UnitType-Tree-Thumb.jpg[/img] [img]http://warfoundry.co.uk/images/development/UnitType-Tree-Add-Thumb.jpg[/img]

I guess drag-and-drop might be good as well, but I've never looked into that (and I'm sure the WinForms mechanism won't be as nice and clean as the Eclipse/Java mechanism!)

[IBBoard]

Anyone had a chance to check this code out yet? It's in my Dev repo at the moment. I can fiddle with positioning etc (e.g. docking it instead of making it another floating window, adding a preference for whether to show it or not) but it depends what other people think and how well it works.

[snowblizz]

I was just going to try but the IBDev fork won't read ANY datafiles. Since you just played around with the zip handling I'm thinking it's connected...

[IBBoard]

Really? Bugger. I thought I'd run the unit tests and it had all worked :\ The alternate UI should be in a separate head on the IBB-Dev WinForms now - you'll need to update to revision 694f23814ec2 (I should probably tag/bookmark it to make it easier). The file loading changes were in the API, so if you're having problems you should be able to roll it back a version (e.g. update to 131fb56da842, which should be fine).

Time to go and fix that, I guess

[edit] Nope, I can't have run those tests. I don't know how it ever worked and ran quicker :\

[snowblizz]

Hmm, I must really suck at this, now I can't see any unitTypeTree (or whatever) form in the code base? At least it reads the datafiles with the rollback.
Gotta say, this Hg is hideously complicated!