Hi again,

I have some news!

As I told you last week, a group of designers, boosted by your kind welcome, decided to make a first approach to contribute to improve Inkscape's UX and UI. Our project started yesterday and our goal is to have a preliminary usability and design style guide at the end of the week. This email is just a summarized status of the project. We are writing a design guides documentation and we will publish this extended version as soon as possible.

Today, after a couple of days working, we started to write down our first day resolutions and I would like to share it with you. First things first: working in every aspect of such a big software like inkscape would take a lot of time so we decided to focus on basic usability features, trying to keep all functionalities (with no new features) and of course keeping it's soul that makes it unique.

We’ve made several working sessions to clarify the main inkscape problems in terms of user experience. We got to a list of good and bad things that lead us to what we find are the major issues that we will approach:

There are a lot of non key features at plain sight and at the same level of the basic ones.
There is no consistency in the user flow
There is room for improvements on visual design.

With this in mind we decided to focus our inkscape redesign proposal on three basic concepts:

Structure
We find the current layout structure a bit chaotic. Grouping the type of content and functionalities provided to the user will greatly facilitate his tasks. Defining areas can facilitate the user recognizing what he need without using his memory. You can read more about recognition rather than recall.

Tools organization
We find several usability issues on current tools placements and organization. There are too many options at plain sight, with a questionable or difficult to understand organization and with no apparent hierarchy.

Visual simplicity

Inkscape has a lot of features and its a powerful tool but its a little bit overdesigned. Visual design can make a difference. A modern, simple and visually beautiful interface will improve usability for experienced designers and bring some new users from proprietary competitors.

What are we working on now?

Structure: We focused today on Inkscape structure defining the main areas that inkscape should use and its specific tasks. We’ll discriminate between tools, subtools, panels, colors palette and info.
Tools organization:We’ll make a proposal that involves grouping similar tools, organizing them with some kind of hierarchy and displaying options and parameters consistently.

Tomorrow we will send you our first visual approach and conclusions for this two concepts.

We are using a github repo if you want to follow our advances. Please note that we are doing a lot of testing so current files in the repo are not definitive yet until sent to this list: https://github.com/PIWEEK/rethinkscape

We will continue to send you this emails to keep you informed of our advances. Any feedback will be welcome, we will try to be on IRC inkscape-dev room as well if you may want to contact us (user: xaviju).

Best Regards,

Xavi Julián

Front-end developer in Kaleidos and UI designer in taiga.io