Hello,

Since our last contact we've continued our project, most importantly by carrying out a heuristic evaluation of Inkscape.

Unfortunately the heuristic evaluation didn't turn out as solid results as we had hoped. However we did find out that with the resources available for us and with our current plan, Inkscape is indeed too complex software to test without proper focus on specific parts of it.

As planned, we are going to proceed with usability testing in January. To make sure that the usability testing would turn out useful results, we would like to have some ideas and feedback from you. To point out what kind of things would help us get more useful results for you, here's a few questions:

1. What kind of users should we find for the testing? 2. What tools and functions should the tests be focused on? 3. What kind of tasks should there be?

- Aslak

2010/11/30 Aslak Karsi <aslak.karsi@...400...>

Hello,

What made us think about the bug prioritization as one way of assisting you was the large amount of usability bugs we found marked as wishlist items in the buglist. Thankyou for the link to the bug importance page, I don't think we had found that page yet.

Length of our project is 230 working hours per student, with exception of project leader doing 130 hours. Out of that time we have used about 30-40 hours per student for preparations and familiarizing ourselves with Inkscape.

We've planned schedule for the project so that we could do heuristic evaluation and give you a report of our findings before Christmas. Next year after Christmas holidays have ended we would start planing and doing usability testing. If we go ahead with this plan we've estimated that the final report could be delivered on week 10 or 11 next year.

And again, please do tell us your ideas because the plan can be changed, and it is something we would happily do if you have some specific usability related task for us to do.

• Aslak

2010/11/30 Josh Andler <scislac@...400...>

Hello,

...

It's nice to hear about your interest in helping to improve the usability of Inkscape. With your list of ideas, one of the items is a little tough, and that is the prioritization of usability related bugs. Our bugs have always been approached as follows: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Bug_management#Bug_importance . So, almost all usability bugs get prioritized as low. However, we may be able to figure out a separate system for the usability bugs that your group works with where we have specific tagging to allow bending the normal rules. Obviously evaluation and testing is also greatly welcome.

In terms of suggesting specific areas to test, I say there is enough of you to really dig in and explore all over the place. :) As a side question, how long will your project be going on for?

Cheers, Josh

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 8:10 AM, Aslak Karsi <aslak.karsi@...400...> wrote:

...

Hello

We are a group of five students from Finland, studying at University of Oulu, Department of Information Processing Science. We are currently

working

...

on a project assignment to offer help in usability development for an

open

...

source software project of our choice.

Past few weeks we have been familiarizing ourselves with Inkscape and

its

...

community and now we would like to offer our work resources for your

use.

...

We have already figured out a few ideas of what we could do for the

Inkscape

...

project:

• Heuristic evaluation
• Usability testing
• Prioritization of usability related bugs on the buglist

To produce as useful results as possible, we would like to hear your

ideas.

...

How do you feel about the tasks suggested? Is there some specific part

of

...

the software we should focus on? Any ideas and feedback at this point

would

...

be greatly appreciated.

Project leader Aslak Karsi Marko Arffman Matias Patosalmi Jouni Rissanen Matti Siipola

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...

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...

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On 1/15/11, Aslak Karsi wrote:

Hello,

We are now back from holidays and ready to continue our project.

To continue our project as planned with usability testing of Inkscape, we would need a goal for our testing. What part of the software should we test, some certain set of tools or some certain part of the UI? Also what is it that we are trying to find out? Because of complexity of Inkscape a clear goal is necessary for this kind of test to be successful.

Alternatively, if there isn't anything that you need to have tested, we are prepared to drop usability testing to take on some other task, as long as it falls under the topic of usability as required by our project. We still have about 170 hours per student to use on this project, so if there's any usability related issues that we might be able to help with, let us know.

Hi Aslak,

We discussed this proposal, but for reasons of terrible procrastination never got back to you. Sorry about that.

The thing about Inkscape is that we know a lot of our problems, but ultimately lack manpower to fix them.

One thing that, IMO, would be good to test is our existing dialogs: if they are clean enough, how placement of widgets could be improved, whether existing widgets are optimal etc.

There are at least two areas of interest we can think of as an alternative project:

1. Live Path Effects dockable dialog has a couple of major issues: range of possible values isn't exactly clear, and the effects parameters tend to loom, as they are simply listed one by one in top-bottom direction.

There is a recent trend to make better widgets that would fix the range visibility issue, as well as provide better experience to tablet users. And example of a partly implemented (http://vimeo.com/16616760) GIMP proposal is here:

http://mmiworks.net/test/small.png

IMO, it's worth having a look at that, also for tools options toolbar.

2. We seem to have different views regarding the existing SVG Filters editor. Right now it implements the SVG specification in a very literal manner. Some people like it a lot (like Ivan, who did most filter presets for Inkscape), and some people find it a terrible solution.

We have two blueprints that suggest two different solutions: one suggests an even simpler UI, and the other one suggests something like node compositing:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/non-advanced-filters-ui https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/improved-filter-effects-dial...

That makes three different approaches to editing SVG filters, one of them implemented and currently used. You could test the existing implementation and come up with suggestions how to improve it, or come up with a new design proposal.

Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

On 2/8/11, Aslak Karsi wrote:

Hi Alexandre,

Thankyou for your reply. Our team had a meeting today, in which we decided to take up the task of testing and re-design of the SVG Filter editor. Our plan for now is to go through the existing implementation and the blueprints, then move on to prototyping new UI designs, iterating them and evaluating them. The result should be a new blueprint, which according to our schedule should be ready on week 13.

Thank you!

Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

Hi!

Your blueprint is basically what I want (if you remember, I wrote my wishes here few months ago). Maybe 4 suggestions: - 2 sections for the filter, why not. But having the possiibility to take a basic filter as a base and change it to make a custom filter would be great. - When you make a custom filter, allow to use it as a basic filter inside (not as a base) a new filter (and allow to change the input values). - activate/desactivate basic filters inside custom filters too. - Create handy tools like rotate, resize, mirror,...

Great job anyway!

Teto.

Le 18/04/2011 17:47, Aslak Karsi a écrit :

Hi!

I'm glad to announce that the final product of our project is now ready. We would have liked to conduct some usability testing on our UI prototypes with real Inkscape users, but unfortunately we are running out of time both in terms of working hours and our project deadline.

The blueprint for our suggestion of SVG Filter Editor can be found on Inkscape wiki, at http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/SpecFilterEditorUI

We'd appreciate any comments and feedback on the blueprint. Our team is also prepared to answer any questions you might have.

• Aslak

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Interesting project !

In your Added features section by "saving function of custom filters" do you mean saving filters settings ?

ivan

________________________________ De : Aslak Karsi <aslak.karsi@...400...> À : Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> Cc : inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Envoyé le : Lun 18 avril 2011, 17h 47min 11s Objet : Re: [Inkscape-devel] Usability development help for Inkscape available

Hi!

I'm glad to announce that the final product of our project is now ready. We would have liked to conduct some usability testing on our UI prototypes with real Inkscape users, but unfortunately we are running out of time both in terms of working hours and our project deadline.

The blueprint for our suggestion of SVG Filter Editor can be found on Inkscape wiki, at http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/SpecFilterEditorUI

We'd appreciate any comments and feedback on the blueprint. Our team is also prepared to answer any questions you might have.

- Aslak

Hi

I've collected all the questions and comments so far and here are the replys to them from our team. This post turned out to be quite a wall of text, but I hope it remains at least somewhat readable.

2 sections for the filter, why not. But having the possiibility to

take a basic filter as a base and change it to make a custom filter

would be great.

The idea was that the user could use these basic filters as a base to custom filter. Think as if these built-in filters are just premade custom filters that are fully customizable even further.

When you make a custom filter, allow to use it as a basic filter

inside (not as a base) a new filter (and allow to change the input

values).

That is why we applied the save and load function. User can load these saved/previously used filters and modify/add something new to them.

activate/deactivate basic filters inside custom filters too.

Do you mean these eye icons? They are also in custom filter editor.

Create handy tools like rotate, resize, mirror,...

This is why we need user feedback :) these kind of functions didnt pop into our minds.

How do I disconnect nodes in node editor? Just drag the arrowhead and drop

on free space?

Arrows are selectable like the effect icons. Just click the connection line and press delete.

You mention input reordering for nodes. Will this be in a separate

dialog, or directly somehow embedded in the node editor? In case of

dialog, how do I distinguish for example two different inputs of the

same type? (I guess those will be labeled with original input numbers

and keeping the node editor still visible?)

By this we ment switching the inputs for a selected effect. We found out that eg. composite gets two (2) input connections. If we swap the connections we get a different output from the effect. This is why we thought it should be easy to switch input order easily. This is shown in the last picture in custom filter workflow. Inputs are numbered and showed in connection view. This can also be seen in the same picture.

What about a possibility to add textual notes in the node editor

canvas or for used filters (i.e. tab "Notes" in the bottom)? I think

this can improve editing experience when creating complex filters

and/or editing after some time has passed.

That would be a good idea.

In your Added features section by "saving function of custom filters"

do you mean saving filters settings ?

We thought it would be great to save the whole filter including its settings. For example.... user creates a filter which is created from built-in vertical blur (the blur that can be accessed now from top panel: Filters -> Blurs -> Motion blur vertical) and a self-made custom filter. We could say the filter consists of these two parts. User can then save this as a one filter which could be then used later in other drawings by just loading it.

I assume the screenshots are mockups, but do you plan on also doing an

actual implementation? (At least of some of your ideas.) In either case,

have you thought about ways to overcome some of the technical hurdles?

In particular, you suggest to allow applying multiple filters to one

image. Do you have any thoughts on how to implement that in terms of SVG

representation? (If you also have ideas about how to reuse custom

filters in much the same way as filter primitives then I'd love to hear

it as well of course.)

Yes the screenshots are just mockups. We feel that we don't have enough programming experience to actually implement these changes. We thought about the technical difficulties while developing this idea. We're not claiming to be SVG experts, but understood by reading http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/ that it could be possible to include multiple filters in a single svg file (see http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#AccessingBackgroundImage example). This should allow separating the filters by filter ids. After all... separating filter can be thought as applying them one after another, right? IDs could simply be shown as filter name in the UI. The problem is how to generate the connections from this svg file. By this I mean how the effects are distributed at the canvas. The current view is easier for this as they are shown as a waterfall type view. Reusing these custom filter could be done by simply saving this filter list as a single svg file. This file could then later on be loaded if needed. It should open up the same way it was saved (filter are separated and editable, parts can be deleted etc.)

As for the proposed interface, I'm not entirely sure I like the idea of

splitting it into a basic and complex interface. If the "complex"

interface is easy to use, why not make it the only interface? If it is

not easy to use, then that might be a problem. I do understand that you

don't always want open this huge window just to change a few things, but

I can also see different ways of solving that particular problem (for

example, instead of having two relatively unrelated dialogs you could

make a dialog that can "slide out").

By splitting the interface into two halves we thought it could be easier for new users to familiarize themselves with filters and of course easier using of these premade filters. At one point we had a mockup in which these two halves are together. They were linked as the loading is now in the basic editor. The active filter list is the same in both views so it could be merged in this approach. The problem in this vision was how to show filter parameters. And also this kind of UI would fill the screen, which is what we wanted to avoid.

What I DO like is showing sample images, making filter "presets" more

accessible and of course a nicer filter editor. I also very much like

that you have taken the effort to do this kind of work, I might sound a

little critical above, but that's only because there is now something to

be critical about :) (Which is way, way better than having nothing.)

Constructive criticism is also welcome. Feel free to ask for more

information if needed :)

And please correct me if I understood this SVG standard completely wrong.

The way to apply multiple filters to a single object is grouping. But what is lacking to manage groups is a true object manager.

ivan

________________________________ De : Jasper van de Gronde <th.v.d.gronde@...528...> À : inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Envoyé le : Mar 19 avril 2011, 16h 50min 30s Objet : Re: [Inkscape-devel] Usability development help for Inkscape available

On 19-04-11 15:00, Aslak Karsi wrote:

... Yes the screenshots are just mockups. We feel that we don't have enough programming experience to actually implement these changes. We thought about the technical difficulties while developing this idea. We're not claiming to be SVG experts, but understood by reading http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/ that it could be possible to include multiple filters in a single svg file (see http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#AccessingBackgroundImage example). This should allow separating the filters by filter ids. After all... separating filter can be thought as applying them one after another, right? ...

Well, yes and no. SVG has filters and filter primitives. (It is not uncommon to hear the term filter being used for both, but technically there is a big difference.) A filter is what is applied to an object and it consists of a number of filter primitives. As you can only apply one filter to each object, and filters cannot be used as filter primitives, there is no standard way to apply multiple filters to a single object (very, very unfortunately). That is why I wondered whether you had any solution for that (as it looks like this is possible in your mockup). But I guess eventually we'll either figure out some way to "fake" it, or wait until SVG does support it.

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