On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 1:20 AM, Ryan Lerch wrote:
HI all,
I just noticed the new "Do Geometric constructions" tool in the inkscape trunk, and this got me thinking a few things about this new tool (and inkscape usability and UX in general).
It's by no means new :) It's probably 6 years old or so.
First up, this tool provides (among other things) two new ways to create a circle: "a circle by three points", and a "circle by center and radius". These are pretty neat additions, but my first question when I saw this was why is this in a completely separate tool, not as a sub-tool of the circle tool.
Because the idea was the create a set of CAD-flavored features that are not limited to drawing circles, and that idea was, in fact, implemented :)
but from a user point of view, if you want to create a circle, wouldn't you expect these options in the circle tool?
What would you do about drawing bisectors and suchlike? :)
I know this is kind of out of the blue, but i have been thinking a lot lately about some of the inconsistencies like this in the inkscape interface, and would love to try to help contribute to fixes / be involved with helping with the usability of new tools we create. Has there ever been anyone involved with doing usablity reviews / testing of this sort? (doctormon, i know you did some last year :) ) I know of plenty of UX people that use Inkscape that would probably be keen in contributing in this area.
It's definitely something that needs tons of work :)
Alex