The user interface
Jul. 1st, 2009 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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I'd like to hear your thoughts on the current user interface for Joule, and how it can be improved. Currently, you have three things to enter, in a space that looks like this:
You need to enter
Update: I have implemented 1, 3 and 4 as an experiment. I would love to hear feedback either for or against it.
You need to enter
- Your username. This is a text box.
- A site. This is a drop-down list containing all the sites we support. If you came to Joule from a particular site (say, Twitter), that site will be pre-selected. Otherwise LiveJournal will be pre-selected.
- You must press either the "chart" button or the "graph" button.
- "Graph" isn't much used (92% of all reports are charts), and it probably should be something you can select when you're looking at the chart rather than from the front page. So maybe there should just be a "go" or "OK" button on the front page that took you to the chart.
- I would like to have other options than "chart" or "graph", like a line graph showing the change in the number of your followers over all the time you've been using Joule. We could have this accessible in the same way as just discussed for the bar graph, so there wouldn't have to be three or more buttons to choose from.
- Perhaps the controls shouldn't be on the reports page because they clutter up the report, and it would be better just to have them on the the main page, and a link back to the main page on the other pages.
- Most people (93%) don't go to their page using the controls. I think what happens is that they use them the first time, and then bookmark the report page. So perhaps we can simplify further and we shouldn't have the sites box. Instead you'd just type your username and it would give you a list of charts you might be interested in. That takes a little longer for the first-time user, but perhaps it's a bit less alarming or confusing than all those controls.
Update: I have implemented 1, 3 and 4 as an experiment. I would love to hear feedback either for or against it.
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Date: 2010-09-19 07:59 pm (UTC)