[UX, UI] Questions about collaboration - inkscape
Hi inkscape devs,
We are a group of UX, UI designers and front-end devs from Kaleidos http://www.kaleidos.net/community/, a company from Madrid, Spain. We are also designers and developers of the open source tool Taiga.io. We use inkscape in our everyday work and we love it, *so we would like to collaborate with our expertise to help make it even better.*
Some months ago, we started to think on how we could improve usability and design in inkscape and other open source tools. We found out that inkscape improved in the last years, but still have some issues. We made some initial wireframes and designs, but nothing has been developed until now.
In our company we enjoy a *free* week every six months to work and collaborate (or develop) in open source projects. This week is called ΠWEEK [*a.k.a. Personal innovation week] *(piweek.com). *This ΠWEEK we decided to focus on inkscape to do a first approach on how could look the inkscape we would love* in terms of look & feel as designers and front-end devs.
Of course, we know that is hard work and it is not just designing it so we decided to write to the list *to get some advice on how to collaborate in the best way possible for designers and developers and hopefully fit in the inkscape development roadmap. *
Even if this week we will probably be doing just a creative exercise it would be amazing if we could get some parts of this work and focus on it in a longer term to be part of the inkscape development roadmap for the future with your feedback and fitting in the inkscape needs and conditions.
It will be amazing if you show us what is the best way to contribute, what would be your needs and how we could be part of this amazing community.
Soon we will publish the result and hopefully we get some feedback as well.
Thanks!
Xavi *Front-end developer in Kaleidos and UI designer in taiga.io http://taiga.io*
Hi Xaviju,
In short, scratch your itches. You'll be most passionate and effective with either what you know best, or what you desire the most.
When you say some initial wireframes and designs were made but nothing had been developed until now, are you saying you have created something recently to share or that you will create something in the upcoming week? Even if nothing had been polished yet, sharing existing wireframes sooner might not be bad.
Obviously we would love some mockups or feedback on the interface design. We do have some constraints on our end due to the cross-platform toolkit that we use. In other words, there might be some of restrictions we will face or run into which might make implementing things very challenging or potentially not practical.
It seems like your company focuses on web oriented design. If you wanted to do a UX review of the website and create some design mockups in that area, I don't know that anyone would be terribly insulted in that category either.
Inkscape is primarily created by volunteers and other people who are passionate... share your passion with us. Whatever way your team goes, we're excited to see what you come up with. :) We're also happy to have you as users and in our development community!
Cheers, Josh
On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 7:55 AM, Xaviju Julián <xaviju@...400...> wrote:
Hi inkscape devs,
We are a group of UX, UI designers and front-end devs from Kaleidos, a company from Madrid, Spain. We are also designers and developers of the open source tool Taiga.io. We use inkscape in our everyday work and we love it, so we would like to collaborate with our expertise to help make it even better.
Some months ago, we started to think on how we could improve usability and design in inkscape and other open source tools. We found out that inkscape improved in the last years, but still have some issues. We made some initial wireframes and designs, but nothing has been developed until now.
In our company we enjoy a free week every six months to work and collaborate (or develop) in open source projects. This week is called ΠWEEK [a.k.a. Personal innovation week] (piweek.com). This ΠWEEK we decided to focus on inkscape to do a first approach on how could look the inkscape we would love in terms of look & feel as designers and front-end devs.
Of course, we know that is hard work and it is not just designing it so we decided to write to the list to get some advice on how to collaborate in the best way possible for designers and developers and hopefully fit in the inkscape development roadmap.
Even if this week we will probably be doing just a creative exercise it would be amazing if we could get some parts of this work and focus on it in a longer term to be part of the inkscape development roadmap for the future with your feedback and fitting in the inkscape needs and conditions.
It will be amazing if you show us what is the best way to contribute, what would be your needs and how we could be part of this amazing community.
Soon we will publish the result and hopefully we get some feedback as well.
Thanks!
Xavi Front-end developer in Kaleidos and UI designer in taiga.io
Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=164703151&iu=/4140/ostg.cl... _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
On Sat, 2014-12-13 at 16:55 +0100, Xaviju Julián wrote:
Hi inkscape devs,
We are a group of UX, UI designers and front-end devs from Kaleidos, a company from Madrid, Spain. We are also designers and developers of the open source tool Taiga.io. We use inkscape in our everyday work and we love it, so we would like to collaborate with our expertise to help make it even better.
Glad to hear you love Inkscape! We would love to have you collaborate with us.
Some months ago, we started to think on how we could improve usability and design in inkscape and other open source tools. We found out that inkscape improved in the last years, but still have some issues. We made some initial wireframes and designs, but nothing has been developed until now.
Can you share you observation and your designs?
In our company we enjoy a free week every six months to work and collaborate (or develop) in open source projects. This week is called ΠWEEK [a.k.a. Personal innovation week] (piweek.com). This ΠWEEK we decided to focus on inkscape to do a first approach on how could look the inkscape we would love in terms of look & feel as designers and front-end devs.
I think most current Inkscape developers recognize that our UI could use some serious work. Most of it has been added piece-meal over the years with out much thought about consistency.
Of course, we know that is hard work and it is not just designing it so we decided to write to the list to get some advice on how to collaborate in the best way possible for designers and developers and hopefully fit in the inkscape development roadmap.
I would not worry about fitting into the road map. UI work is probably pretty independent of the work covered there.
For collaboration... let us know when is your next ΠWEEK. Join the IRC channel on 'inkscape-devel' on 'freenode'.
Even if this week we will probably be doing just a creative exercise it would be amazing if we could get some parts of this work and focus on it in a longer term to be part of the inkscape development roadmap for the future with your feedback and fitting in the inkscape needs and conditions.
I am not sure what level of contributing you are thinking about. Are you thinking about just design work or actually contributing code?
If the former case, while UX/UI design work is definitely needed, getting it implemented is probably going to be hit or miss. We have a rather small group of core developers, all volunteer, who may or may not get excited enough to implement the designs.
In the latter case, you can pretty much be assured that your design work will make it into Inkscape. We have a fairly low threshold for handing out commit access (two accepted patches).
It will be amazing if you show us what is the best way to contribute, what would be your needs and how we could be part of this amazing community.
Soon we will publish the result and hopefully we get some feedback as well.
Looking forward to it!
Tav
On Sat, 2014-12-13 at 16:55 +0100, Xaviju Julián wrote:
It will be amazing if you show us what is the best way to contribute, what would be your needs and how we could be part of this amazing community.
Hi Xaviju,
I look after the website at inkscape.org and we're developing features which could certainly do with UX/UI review and/or work if you know css.
I'd also like to invite you to create an account on the website so you can upload your wireframes and other designs for sharing. We support inline-svg so there's no need to render the designs before upload.
Thanks for your offer of help, every bit pushes us forwards.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
First of all, thanks!
It is great to see that the community is so friendly and welcoming. It really boosts our excitement and commitment to contribute with our passion. For what I understood you all agree that Inkscape needs some UI work. We are happy to know that there is some work to do. We also understand that contributors are volunteers spending their free time, so our ideas may never be part of inkscape development. Thanks for your honestity, we are aware of that. We do it because we love it, that's the main reason. Hope it helps.
We made a lot of designs in a whiteboard, a lot of time spent around a coffee planing this week and some drawings. Starting tomorrow we will start with some real design. That means we are going to put down on Evolus Pencil and Inkscape our ideas. I will try to keep you informed of the work we are doing though this list or IRC. Explaining what and why we do it so we could receive some feedback. At the end of the week (by friday) we should have something consistent (Is part of the ΠWEEK rules).
Thank you, the team got really excited with your answers. We will start tomorrow morning (9 am in Madrid) and will try to keep in touch though IRC and this list sharing our designs and ideas.
Let me answer your questions personally:
*Josh Andler*
*When you say some initial wireframes and designs were made but nothing*
- had been developed until now, are you saying you have created*
- something recently to share or that you will create something in the*
- upcoming week?*
We have some work already, but I think it's not serious enough. We will share it with you this week.
there might be
some of restrictions we will face or run into which might make implementing things very challenging or potentially not practical.
We would like to know what restrictions you could face. If we know it, we could adapt our ideas to make it suitable for a developer and easier to implement if possible. If it's not possible to implement something, well, then we will accept it :)
If you
wanted to do a UX review of the website and create some design mockups in that area, I don't know that anyone would be terribly insulted in that category either.
We didn't think about that but I will try to help with that in the future in my free time. It's a good idea and I could contribute with code. :)
Thanks Josh!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Tavmjong Bah*
Can you share you observation and your designs?
I am not satisfied enough with what we have so far. This week, as soon as possible (probably Tuesday-Wednesday) we will have some basic ideas I will share with you.
Join the IRC channel on 'inkscape-devel' on 'freenode'.
Nice, I will try to use that communication channel.
Are you thinking about just design work or actually contributing code?
Sadly, we are not coders. We work with some coders at our company that will give us some advice, but they will not participate in this project. We are aware that our contibution could never be implemented. It's no problem.
Thanks Tavmjong
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Martin Owens*
could certainly do with UX/UI review and/or work if you know css.
I didn't think about that and itś out of the scope of this first contribution but I will get in touch with you after this project to learn how to contribute to the web development of inkscape. I can code HTML,CSS,JS. :)
I'd also like to invite you to create an account on the website so you
can upload your wireframes and other designs for sharing
I have an account already, I will use that tool for sharing.
Thanks Martin!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2014-12-14 18:33 GMT+01:00 Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...>:
On Sat, 2014-12-13 at 16:55 +0100, Xaviju Julián wrote:
It will be amazing if you show us what is the best way to contribute, what would be your needs and how we could be part of this amazing community.
Hi Xaviju,
I look after the website at inkscape.org and we're developing features which could certainly do with UX/UI review and/or work if you know css.
I'd also like to invite you to create an account on the website so you can upload your wireframes and other designs for sharing. We support inline-svg so there's no need to render the designs before upload.
Thanks for your offer of help, every bit pushes us forwards.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
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 http://www.nngroup.com/articles/recognition-and-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 http://taiga.io/*
El mar, 16-12-2014 a las 20:00 +0100, Xaviju Julián escribió:
Hi again,
[snip]
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).
Hi xaviju: What version of inkscape are you studying? 0.91 is about to be released and it includes some minor UI improvements. Even though those changes are minor and the general problems persist, they mitigate some of the issues that affect 0.48.x Probably this distinction won't make any difference in the big picture, but if you have to target one version as reference I guess it's better to focus on 0.91.
Gez.
Dear Xavi,
wuaauuu!! Your ideas seems very chagenlling and very attractive. I like so much your mockups, and I think this way will improve usability and general user attractiveness for Inkscape.
My doubt, is the feasibility for the developers team to implement them because some things sounds hard to implement. I think If you organize your proposals in different groups (depend on the complexity to develop) it is more probable we can see some improvements in the near future. For example: only theme things, simple menus reorganization, more complex changes...
Good initiative! And users are expecting improvements like this to reach Inkscape to version 1.
Cheers, Fernando
2014-12-16 20:00 GMT+01:00 Xaviju Julián <xaviju@...400...>:
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 http://www.nngroup.com/articles/recognition-and-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 http://taiga.io/*
Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE
http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=164703151&iu=/4140/ostg.cl... _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
Hi Gez,
We are using latest version on ArchLinux (Inkscape 0.48.5) but we have always an eye on the new features of 0.91 through http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.91#Inkscape_0.91
Thanks!
----------------------------------------------------------
Hi Fernando,
Thanks again for your kind words. At the end of the week I hope I will send you a more detailed version of the proposal and a more extense documentation explaining every aspect of the proposals. But I can tell you that we are trying to atomize our proposals so a developer could take just one task. We are not doing a major redesign, but finding small problems and our proposed solutions both in usability and design. We will take into account your suggestions to be very specific on our proposals.
Thanks again.
2014-12-17 7:34 GMT+01:00 Fernando Cuenca Margalef < fcuencamargalef@...400...>:
Dear Xavi,
wuaauuu!! Your ideas seems very chagenlling and very attractive. I like so much your mockups, and I think this way will improve usability and general user attractiveness for Inkscape.
My doubt, is the feasibility for the developers team to implement them because some things sounds hard to implement. I think If you organize your proposals in different groups (depend on the complexity to develop) it is more probable we can see some improvements in the near future. For example: only theme things, simple menus reorganization, more complex changes...
Good initiative! And users are expecting improvements like this to reach Inkscape to version 1.
Cheers, Fernando
2014-12-16 20:00 GMT+01:00 Xaviju Julián <xaviju@...400...>:
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 http://www.nngroup.com/articles/recognition-and-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 http://taiga.io/*
Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE
http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=164703151&iu=/4140/ostg.cl... _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
Hello Xaviju,
I recommend you, to use the 0.91 version. I use It some time ago, and It's great, with new features, performance improvement y with reasonable stability and free of bugs.
Cheers
2014-12-17 9:30 GMT+01:00 Xaviju Julián <xaviju@...400...>:
Hi Gez,
We are using latest version on ArchLinux (Inkscape 0.48.5) but we have always an eye on the new features of 0.91 through http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.91#Inkscape_0.91
Thanks!
Hi Fernando,
Thanks again for your kind words. At the end of the week I hope I will send you a more detailed version of the proposal and a more extense documentation explaining every aspect of the proposals. But I can tell you that we are trying to atomize our proposals so a developer could take just one task. We are not doing a major redesign, but finding small problems and our proposed solutions both in usability and design. We will take into account your suggestions to be very specific on our proposals.
Thanks again.
2014-12-17 7:34 GMT+01:00 Fernando Cuenca Margalef < fcuencamargalef@...400...>:
Dear Xavi,
wuaauuu!! Your ideas seems very chagenlling and very attractive. I like so much your mockups, and I think this way will improve usability and general user attractiveness for Inkscape.
My doubt, is the feasibility for the developers team to implement them because some things sounds hard to implement. I think If you organize your proposals in different groups (depend on the complexity to develop) it is more probable we can see some improvements in the near future. For example: only theme things, simple menus reorganization, more complex changes...
Good initiative! And users are expecting improvements like this to reach Inkscape to version 1.
Cheers, Fernando
2014-12-16 20:00 GMT+01:00 Xaviju Julián <xaviju@...400...>:
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 http://www.nngroup.com/articles/recognition-and-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 http://taiga.io/*
Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE
http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=164703151&iu=/4140/ostg.cl... _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
Hi Xaviju,
Great work so far! I would definitely recommend actually using a copy of either 0.91 pre3 or a build based on trunk for your evaluation. Simply put, 0.48.5 is just a bugfix release in the 0.48.x series... so there are no changes to the feature set in your copy for 4 years. Needless to say you probably can't get a good feel for all that has been worked on by just reading release notes.
In one of the documents it mentions "Room for improvements on gradients", and there have been many improvements for the Gradient Tool in 0.91 (with complimentary improvements in the Fill & Stroke dialog). Likewise, that document also mentions "Room for improvements on groups & layers management" and in trunk there is a new Objects dialog which likely addresses a number of shortcomings in the Layers dialog that you see.
So, that's my recommendation... please check out 0.91 or preferably a trunk build so you know better where things stand.
Cheers, Josh
Hi again! 2nd day news from our ΠWEEK!
*Congrats for 0.91 version! We’ve seen cool UI improvements (we love the measurement tool feature!). * Being said that, we still find valuable our proposal as our approach is focused not on features but in global usability.
As we promised, today we kept working on our UX/UI proposal for Inkscape. We’ve been working on a proposal to redefine main structural areas and on organizing the tools. 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.
*Structure*
About the structure, our goal is to define different action areas so it could help not only at organizing the current content and features but at providing a recognizable pattern for the user. This pattern should also facilitate the developers the decision making about where to place new features. We’ve made a working session with the UX team and here you can find a wireframe that summarizes our conclusions.
https://inkscape.org/es/gallery/item/3152/
*Tools organization*
And we did sort of the same thing regarding the tools. Our conclusions:
https://inkscape.org/es/gallery/item/3164/
*So what’s next? *
Tomorrow we will work on a general design focused on visual details. Being this finished, we will have accomplished our goal for this week, that was delivering to you Inkscape guys a full and reasoned redesign proposal.
No need to say that we are extremely excited about this project and that we would love to have feedback from you about all this. How do you see the proposal so far?
Best, Xavi
2014-12-17 17:39 GMT+01:00 Josh Andler <scislac@...400...>:
Hi Xaviju,
Great work so far! I would definitely recommend actually using a copy of either 0.91 pre3 or a build based on trunk for your evaluation. Simply put, 0.48.5 is just a bugfix release in the 0.48.x series... so there are no changes to the feature set in your copy for 4 years. Needless to say you probably can't get a good feel for all that has been worked on by just reading release notes.
In one of the documents it mentions "Room for improvements on gradients", and there have been many improvements for the Gradient Tool in 0.91 (with complimentary improvements in the Fill & Stroke dialog). Likewise, that document also mentions "Room for improvements on groups & layers management" and in trunk there is a new Objects dialog which likely addresses a number of shortcomings in the Layers dialog that you see.
So, that's my recommendation... please check out 0.91 or preferably a trunk build so you know better where things stand.
Cheers, Josh
On Wed, 2014-12-17 at 20:28 +0100, Xaviju Julián wrote:
Tomorrow we will work on a general design focused on visual details. Being this finished, we will have accomplished our goal for this week, that was delivering to you Inkscape guys a full and reasoned redesign proposal.
No need to say that we are extremely excited about this project and that we would love to have feedback from you about all this. How do you see the proposal so far?
I will review the Tools organization:
1. The first thing I think is that you've confused the tools which effect the canvas, with the "panels zone" activation. You'll notice how none of the current tools activate the panels. But this is ok because many of your ideas could be proper tools, while others should be re-thought when it comes to the panels and how they are activated and hidden.
a. The path selection tool is high use for a lot of use cases. It's low use only applies to some cases, so we should be careful not to bury it.
b. The Align tool would be useful if it was a selection mode with the align tools all nicely designed into the settings bar. Certainly solve my align handles design issue if it was a tool. It might be possible to add the distribute and grid align tools too.
c. The document settings could just be renamed 'document' and the most common elements of document settings could be on the tool bar too. This would certainly help with future multi-page support.
d. XML editing is fairly low use for most cases, it's buried I think because of that.
e. Tweak paths has gone away. It's very useful for some cases.
f. Not sure what edit object would do. Open the objects panel?
Hope this was helpful, thanks for exploring the ui
Best Regards, Martin Owens
El mié, 17-12-2014 a las 16:40 -0500, Martin Owens escribió:
I will review the Tools organization:
- The first thing I think is that you've confused the tools which
effect the canvas, with the "panels zone" activation. You'll notice how none of the current tools activate the panels. But this is ok because many of your ideas could be proper tools, while others should be re-thought when it comes to the panels and how they are activated and hidden.
I think those buttons should be placed as a header of the panels area. They belong there, it makes more sense to look for them in that area and in the proposed position they break the toolbar in two categories that are not necessarily regarded as "primary and secondary" by users. The reordering of the existing tools is in my opinion questionable. I'm all for grouping similar tools under the same button (the primitives creation tools together, for instance), but the new ordering shouldn't disrupt the usual workflow unless there's a compelling reason to re-locate the tools.
a. The path selection tool is high use for a lot of use cases. It's low use only applies to some cases, so we should be careful not to bury it.
Agree 100% This is one example of a tool that is currently placed in a handy position (by the select tool) and in the proposal falls to a less convenient place.
Hi Martin and Gez,
First of all, thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate it! I will try to answer to your feedback on the same email since you agree in some ideas.
1. The first thing I think is that you've confused the tools which
effect the canvas, with the "panels zone" activation. You'll notice how none of the current tools activate the panels. But this is ok because many of your ideas could be proper tools, while others should be re-thought when it comes to the panels and how they are activated and hidden.
I think those buttons should be placed as a header of the panels area. They
belong there, it makes more sense to look for them in that area and in the proposed position they break the toolbar in two categories that are not necessarily regarded as "primary and secondary" by users. The reordering of the existing tools is in my opinion questionable. I'm all for grouping similar tools under the same button (the primitives creation tools together, for instance), but the new ordering shouldn't disrupt the usual workflow unless there's a compelling reason to re-locate the tools.
We thought about this and we think you are right. Our idea was to keep in a single area all the tools that a user could need at first sight. Also, based on different user profiles and expertise levels, we divided the tools into primary and secondary tools, but we are not sure it will fit in every user need so we reverted this idea and took out the panels icons. We like the 0.91 version where all panels are actually panels instead of floating windows. Based on the gestalt idea of proximity we thought it could be useful to add panel icons to the right side as a panel bar as *Gez* proposed.
a. The path selection tool is high use for a lot of use cases. It's low
use only applies to some cases, so we should be careful not to bury it.
Agree 100%
This is one example of a tool that is currently placed in a handy position (by the select tool) and in the proposal falls to a less convenient place.
Since we re-arranged the tools in the left sidebar, path selection tool got promoted to the 4th position.
b. The Align tool would be useful if it was a selection mode with the
align tools all nicely designed into the settings bar. Certainly solve my align handles design issue if it was a tool. It might be possible to add the distribute and grid align tools too.
We are trying not to add new features if not needed by just rearranging the current icons to keep it simple. Said that, we think that sounds like a great idea. We are not sure about the align tool (it could become a new click to open the tool options every time we want to align something). But the grid really looks like a tool and we think it should be a tool instead of a bar in the right side.
c. The document settings could just be renamed 'document' and the most
common elements of document settings could be on the tool bar too. This would certainly help with future multi-page support.
Changed on the image
d. XML editing is fairly low use for most cases, it's buried I think because of that.
With our new layout arrangement it gets moved to the right bar, next to the panels. Its only used by some developer profiles but we think it will become more useful when SVG becomes more a trend on web design as well. (it's coming!)
e. Tweak paths has gone away. It's very useful for some cases.
We think its part of the Paths tools so we grouped all this tools together. We tried to make it clear on the document. Do you think it should be an independent tool?
f. Not sure what edit object would do. Open the objects panel?
Sorry, it’s a typo, the correct name is “edit fill & stroke properties”. It is fixed now. :)
That was really helpful. We added a new version of our tools bar proposal with your suggestions.
https://www.inkscape.org/es/gallery/item/3188/
Thanks again for your feedback. This was our first iteration. We will be happy to receive more feedback to make it even better.
Best, Xavi
Dear Xavi,
I like very much your proposal. And I hope to see some of this suggestions in the near future in future releases. I love simplicity, and I find very attractive the flat-dark-monocrome theme. Thanks a lot for your work.
I completely agree with your aims about doing this work. I also think that one of the main stoppers for many profesional designers to use Inkscape is UI (not features). It doesn't seem so a professional tool, even it has all the necessary to do a real professional work.
In my opinion, there are 3 weaknesses in Inkscape to be the ultimate tool for all designers in the world:
- Stability. I think the team is working hard in this issue, and the reality is that Inkscape is more and more stable and bug free everyday. So I'm sure this point will be the less important in short time.
- UI: I agree 100% with Xavi tema ideas. The actual Inkscape UI is not attractive, modern nor professional, and not so easy for beginners.
- Lack of integration in a suite. Professionals use several tools, to able to use all of this in the same way and with consistent usability will be the killer value to achieve the level of reconnaissance that Inkscape merit. In open source world there are many good tools to do a suit, but there is no coordination between them to provide a coordinated offer or solution. I know that this issue is very complicated to manage, and there are several options for do the same things. But from my part as a professional user of this tools, I think that will be very powerful to have a suite (coherent and consistent UI and look and feel, and some minimal integration features between them). In my opinion some good candidates to do this suite will be: Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, Darktable and Pitivi (and I have a doubt with Scribus); but I know that there are other candidates. I think all of them are very good tools (and professional suitable), and every of them complement the others. I think also, that this kind of collaboration will provide new users for one tool to the others.
Cheers, Fernando
2014-12-18 18:23 GMT+01:00 Xaviju Julián <xaviju@...400...>:
Hi Martin and Gez,
First of all, thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate it! I will try to answer to your feedback on the same email since you agree in some ideas.
- The first thing I think is that you've confused the tools which
effect the canvas, with the "panels zone" activation. You'll notice how none of the current tools activate the panels. But this is ok because many of your ideas could be proper tools, while others should be re-thought when it comes to the panels and how they are activated and hidden.
I think those buttons should be placed as a header of the panels area.
They belong there, it makes more sense to look for them in that area and in the proposed position they break the toolbar in two categories that are not necessarily regarded as "primary and secondary" by users. The reordering of the existing tools is in my opinion questionable. I'm all for grouping similar tools under the same button (the primitives creation tools together, for instance), but the new ordering shouldn't disrupt the usual workflow unless there's a compelling reason to re-locate the tools.
We thought about this and we think you are right. Our idea was to keep in a single area all the tools that a user could need at first sight. Also, based on different user profiles and expertise levels, we divided the tools into primary and secondary tools, but we are not sure it will fit in every user need so we reverted this idea and took out the panels icons. We like the 0.91 version where all panels are actually panels instead of floating windows. Based on the gestalt idea of proximity we thought it could be useful to add panel icons to the right side as a panel bar as *Gez* proposed.
a. The path selection tool is high use for a lot of use cases. It's low
use only applies to some cases, so we should be careful not to bury it.
Agree 100%
This is one example of a tool that is currently placed in a handy position (by the select tool) and in the proposal falls to a less convenient place.
Since we re-arranged the tools in the left sidebar, path selection tool got promoted to the 4th position.
b. The Align tool would be useful if it was a selection mode with the
align tools all nicely designed into the settings bar. Certainly solve my align handles design issue if it was a tool. It might be possible to add the distribute and grid align tools too.
We are trying not to add new features if not needed by just rearranging the current icons to keep it simple. Said that, we think that sounds like a great idea. We are not sure about the align tool (it could become a new click to open the tool options every time we want to align something). But the grid really looks like a tool and we think it should be a tool instead of a bar in the right side.
c. The document settings could just be renamed 'document' and the most
common elements of document settings could be on the tool bar too. This would certainly help with future multi-page support.
Changed on the image
d. XML editing is fairly low use for most cases, it's buried I think because of that.
With our new layout arrangement it gets moved to the right bar, next to the panels. Its only used by some developer profiles but we think it will become more useful when SVG becomes more a trend on web design as well. (it's coming!)
e. Tweak paths has gone away. It's very useful for some cases.
We think its part of the Paths tools so we grouped all this tools together. We tried to make it clear on the document. Do you think it should be an independent tool?
f. Not sure what edit object would do. Open the objects panel?
Sorry, it’s a typo, the correct name is “edit fill & stroke properties”. It is fixed now. :)
That was really helpful. We added a new version of our tools bar proposal with your suggestions.
https://www.inkscape.org/es/gallery/item/3188/
Thanks again for your feedback. This was our first iteration. We will be happy to receive more feedback to make it even better.
Best, Xavi
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On Sat, 2014-12-20 at 09:44 +0100, Fernando Cuenca Margalef wrote:
professional
This just means being paid for work. It's not really a style or something that can be measured. 'Professional' has been used by Adobe to cleave the world into two imagined worlds of the 'unprofessional' by which they mean bad at the work and 'professional' to mean good at the work.
This is nonsense and I think we should avoid using this language.
Martin,
+1 for that ! Many free open source developers are true (and great!) professionnals but that doesn't matter for them. Every time I see this word or the three letters "PRO" I am irritated and nevertheless often that make me laugh. (Perhaps using the word "Passionnal" for open source developping could help to relativize this language abuse ;-) ivan
Le Samedi 20 décembre 2014 19h55, Martin Owens <doctormo@...1063....> a écrit :
On Sat, 2014-12-20 at 09:44 +0100, Fernando Cuenca Margalef wrote:
professional
This just means being paid for work. It's not really a style or something that can be measured. 'Professional' has been used by Adobe to cleave the world into two imagined worlds of the 'unprofessional' by which they mean bad at the work and 'professional' to mean good at the work.
This is nonsense and I think we should avoid using this language.
Martin,
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El sáb, 20-12-2014 a las 13:55 -0500, Martin Owens escribió:
On Sat, 2014-12-20 at 09:44 +0100, Fernando Cuenca Margalef wrote:
professional
This just means being paid for work. It's not really a style or something that can be measured. 'Professional' has been used by Adobe to cleave the world into two imagined worlds of the 'unprofessional' by which they mean bad at the work and 'professional' to mean good at the work.
This is nonsense and I think we should avoid using this language.
+1000, and pressing the button like crazy if there is one.
:-)
Adobe and other high end tools hijacked the word "professional" and keeo using it in their marketing material, implying that you can only be a professional if you use their tools. If you can get your job done and the result is good enough to get paid, then you're a professional. It's your skills, not the tools you use for the job.
Regarding the rest of the comments:
- The concept of a "suite" is yet another marketing stunt. Adobe, Autodesk, Corel and other big software makers can afford creating "suites" where everything is consistent (well, at least that's the idea. It's not always like that in reality). Free sofware applications are completely different. Different projects use different programming languages, different UI toolkits, etc. and creating a unified suite is not as easy as it sounds. Stop asking for copying what Adobe and others do. It would be far more productive to focus on making free sofware applications interact better rather than expecting a visually uniform "suite" with the same icons, tool naming, UI skin and hotkeys.
Gez
My apologies,
I don't want to offend anybody, and less for any Inkscape developer. I have used for years Inkscape for serious purposes (I've avoid intended the term professional, I didn't know this was so controversial).
I only presented my modest opinion, about the weakness of Inkscape to be a more used and accepted software in graphics design.
I will use Inkscape for the future, I'll try to improve it. Because I'm a fan of it.
Thanks for the good work, Fernando
2014-12-20 19:55 GMT+01:00 Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...>:
On Sat, 2014-12-20 at 09:44 +0100, Fernando Cuenca Margalef wrote:
professional
This just means being paid for work. It's not really a style or something that can be measured. 'Professional' has been used by Adobe to cleave the world into two imagined worlds of the 'unprofessional' by which they mean bad at the work and 'professional' to mean good at the work.
This is nonsense and I think we should avoid using this language.
Martin,
Hello,
I would like to ask if it is possible to create a mockup for "pdf export" dialogue.
Since this is a important topic and not all possible/needed pdf features are implemented at the moment.
In order to attract more "professionals" ;-) we must serve their needs.
Collaboration with Scribus is needed for the function implementation. But the UI must not distract ordinary users from exporting to pdf.
Regards,
Adib. --
On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Fernando Cuenca Margalef < fcuencamargalef@...400...> wrote:
My apologies,
I don't want to offend anybody, and less for any Inkscape developer. I have used for years Inkscape for serious purposes (I've avoid intended the term professional, I didn't know this was so controversial).
I only presented my modest opinion, about the weakness of Inkscape to be a more used and accepted software in graphics design.
I will use Inkscape for the future, I'll try to improve it. Because I'm a fan of it.
Thanks for the good work, Fernando
2014-12-20 19:55 GMT+01:00 Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...>:
On Sat, 2014-12-20 at 09:44 +0100, Fernando Cuenca Margalef wrote:
professional
This just means being paid for work. It's not really a style or something that can be measured. 'Professional' has been used by Adobe to cleave the world into two imagined worlds of the 'unprofessional' by which they mean bad at the work and 'professional' to mean good at the work.
This is nonsense and I think we should avoid using this language.
Martin,
Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE
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On Sat, 2014-12-20 at 23:52 +0100, Fernando Cuenca Margalef wrote:
I didn't know this was so controversial.
Sorry Fernando, I should have prefaced my reply with: "This is not a direct reply but an idea for everyone when talking about UX design". Hope you don't feel too badly.
I only presented my modest opinion,
And most welcome it was.
On Sun, 2014-12-21 at 01:40 +0100, the Adib wrote:
In order to attract more "professionals" ;-) we must serve their
needs.
Ah to be a professional programmer working on inkscape. Those will be the days!
Martin,
Xaviju Julián <xaviju@...360...> writes:
That was really helpful. We added a new version of our tools bar proposal
with your suggestions.
Be very careful when you decide to combine tools. with today's screen sizes there is plenty of vertical space so there is no reason to collapse similar tools into a single icon. Collapsing similar tools may make the application less intimidating and help focus newbies on the important tools, but it decrease discoverability. Also, consider which tools are used often. It make s sense to collapse a number of tools if only one of them is used often and the others aren't, but if two or more are used often, collapsing them into a single icon and asking the user to click and hold to switch will seriously annoy users if they'll have to do it all the time. This is something that I always found time-consuming with Adobe applications - they have all the vector editing tools combined into a single icon - and this is one of the main reasons why I work with Inkscape in a tight production environment even though I have a legal copy of Illustrator.
The one tool combo that would most hinder my work with this design is the shape tool. Circles and rectangles (and to a lesser degree stars/polygons) are something I use so often that it would seriously hinder my work if I had to switch between them.
There is one option that might achieve the best of both worlds - if it was possible for a user to expand collapsed items permanently into a number of toolbar icons.
participants (9)
-
Fernando Cuenca Margalef -
Gez -
Ivan Louette -
Josh Andler -
Martin Owens -
Michael Grosberg -
Tavmjong Bah -
the Adib -
Xaviju Julián