Case Study: Musescore (FLOSS cross-platform sheetmusic/scorewriter) UI/UX

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adrianinsaval
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Re: Case Study: Musescore (FLOSS cross-platform sheetmusic/scorewriter) UI/UX

Post by adrianinsaval »

onekk wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 9:12 am But how to deal with complexity? as airplane cockpit are not made to "impress users" or "confuse users", each button has his scope, and also here there are some efforts of "uniforming things" to reduce problems, that in this area are very dangerous, like some "aerial crash" has proven.
A traditional airplane cockpit is a terrible example to follow for software, analog instruments can't have menus, popups, tooltips, tabs, etc and cannot change depending on context or status. And also is full of things that you only really need when something goes wrong and many things that just show you the status of the machine and duplicate instruments in case the others fail. Most of this does not fit software very well, it's like having the task manager and all it's tabs visible all the time and having solvespace open at the same time in case freecad doesn't work.

A good example of these concepts is the recent changes in sketcher and the core toolbars, previously it took the airplane cockpit approach (but worse because it wasn't as neatly organized), everything was shown at all times (and we even had duplicates too!), it overwhelms you with information and obscure controls, now we shows less buttons but it's the buttons that most actually want to use, some more advanced controls are available in menus and so on, the complexity is still there but the interface is better managed, no functionality was lost, in fact more functionality was added. There are still things to improve though.
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onekk
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Re: Case Study: Musescore (FLOSS cross-platform sheetmusic/scorewriter) UI/UX

Post by onekk »

adrianinsaval wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 11:43 am ...
Sorry, my intention was to tell that not necessarily a "crowded" interface is a "bad things" when dealing with complexity, as if the thing is complex "number of informations" to be entered are necessarily high.

How to deal with this "high number of data", is a matter that has to be "studied" as sometimes it is not too intuitive how to tune things.

I agree with most if not all of your post, especially when speaking about the "Sketcher UI improvement", that has cleaned up the interface and made it "less intimidating".

Sadly this has been achieved with some cost in discussions and misunderstandings, so probably something has to be "tuned" also in the "process of changing things".

Kind Regards

Carlo D.
GitHub page: https://github.com/onekk/freecad-doc.
- In deep articles on FreeCAD.
- Learning how to model with scripting.
- Various other stuffs.

Blog: https://okkmkblog.wordpress.com/
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yorik
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Re: Case Study: Musescore (FLOSS cross-platform sheetmusic/scorewriter) UI/UX

Post by yorik »

Maybe what we would need is to really step back and start a process from scratch, ie. analyze what specifically would actually be wrong or optimizable in the FreeCAD UI, and propose paths to get there, that would be doable the community way. It's no small task...
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onekk
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Re: Case Study: Musescore (FLOSS cross-platform sheetmusic/scorewriter) UI/UX

Post by onekk »

yorik wrote: Wed Dec 21, 2022 3:03 pm Maybe what we would need is to really step back and start a process from scratch, ie. analyze what specifically would actually be wrong or optimizable in the FreeCAD UI, and propose paths to get there, that would be doable the community way. It's no small task...
Interesting proposal, but probably this is needed for a total change in the UI, but IMHO this is not needed, as from what seems to emerge following discussions most of the problem arise from:

- The WB oriented interface, but to manage complexity probably this area is almost untouchable, as it is difficult to think to manage things without having this approach, some task are "mutually exclusive" or have "conflicting parts" that if exposed to the casual user risk to worsen the experience.

- As example some actions like drawing things are reported to behave differently across Sketcher, Draft and probably TechDraw, so maybe some "step back" could start from these area, "similar tools", "similar workflow".

- Another area is Sketcher Constraints, that have some tools that must be started with selected entities and some other that permit to select tool and then select entities, and probably some other that must start with selecting a tool and then selecting the entities only.

Only to mention first things that come in my mind.

But there are also many "noise" of people that came here asking that behave like XXX program, and such sort of noise is increasing.

So it is very difficult to collect "a real image" of user difficulties in a "objective way" so some "abstraction" have to be used.

Overall judgement, is difficult IMHO, having used FreeCAD most of my time with scripting, it is that FC is awesome, and could do a lot of things, almost daily I find a new way of doing things, and learn something, about "hidden gems" and things already present in FreeCAD but not well documented.

The most lacking part is about "development informations" like "how to taylor" the UI, how it is working and "how to make simple things" like making a menu in the main menubar or adding a toolbar in a desired place, and such task. I know that is not so common, but there are some users that are asking for help on learning these things, and some of them are volunteering to help to improve FC, sadly for some aspects of FC there are few people that know "how to do things" and some informations are floating in the forum in a "hard to find" way, like in the middle of a totally unrelated discussion or similar thing.

This is a concern as if a couple of developers will have serious problems and could not be part of the project anymore, I fear that FC development will be seriously impaired.

All the above are merely my impressions, as I'm a normal users and not very skilled with the GUI part.

Regards

Carlo D.
GitHub page: https://github.com/onekk/freecad-doc.
- In deep articles on FreeCAD.
- Learning how to model with scripting.
- Various other stuffs.

Blog: https://okkmkblog.wordpress.com/
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