[Sugar-devel] [Design] Some XoScope-10 feedback

[Gary Martin]

Hi Anish,

Hope you don't mind, late to the party as ever :) I just wanted to send some feedback/suggestions for the XoScope (or insert final chosen name here, pity about 'XoScope', but 'Telescope' seems a sound alternative) Activity from a design point of view (my hint text wordings are only rough suggestions). Tested with XoScope-10 on an XO-1 with Sugar 0.92.2 (build 874).



Live mode:



- Camera icon should show a help hint 'Record image'. This button needs some user feedback when clicked, perhaps a count of photos taken can be shown somewhere, next to the Live/Preview button? Showing a count or indicator of previous photos taken would also help make it more obvious when you resume a Journal entry that photos taken during a session are preserved in its Journal entry for later use, see mockup [1]. FWIW this is I think where the Record UI with its media tray design wins out – you immediately see you have taken a photo, or many, and when you resume you can see the past photos right there without needing to change modes.



- Timer icon should show a help hint 'Timer delay'



- Zoom icon should show a help hint 'Digital zoom'



- For the Exposure/Brightness/Contrast palettes, the slider controls could do with being at least twice as wise so it it easier to make small adjustments in value (I found I was often trying to nudge a single pixel one way or another to capture the most detail).



- Live/Preview button should show a help hint 'Switch to preview mode' vs. 'Switch to live mode'



Preview mode – FWIW we spent _many_ design cycles on Record and Memorize trying to make the activity mode changes/states clear, the comments here are just trying to suggest reasonably incremental steps from your current XoScope design ;)



- Previous button should show a help hint 'Previous', next button should show a help hint 'Next'



- Save image to Journal should show a help hint 'Save to Journal'.



- Trashcan icon should show a help hint. There are two standard icons you may want to re-consider, with a help hint of 'Erase' (round circle with a minus sign, can be seen in the Journal and details view); or 'Clear' (rectangle with an X sign, can be seen in Paint activity in the Edit toolbar). Walter does use a trashcan metaphor in Turtle Art, but it allows recovering tile contents from the trash if you want to rescue something.

I am a little worried about the 'hidden' set of preview images that you need to browse and save out to the Journal individually for use in other activities (took me a few cycles, resumes, and many accidental images before I caught on), but was happy to see that all images are autosaved in the XOScope journal entry when you Stop the activity, so risk of accidental data loss is minimised – especially given how painful it can be trying to capture a nice Luna image through a scope! ;)

[1] Quick mockup showing number of photos taken and an attempts to reorder or the toolbar. The Live/Preview toolbutton here is moved to the left side of the toolbar, just to the right of the Activity icon (both in the live toolbar mode and the preview toolbar mode, so it is still in a static position in each toolbar). When using text in a toolbar you'll need to keep in mind translation text length and plurals. This first one might suffer from moving buttons as the image number updates (unless you lock it to some safe width for expected '## Image' translated text). Note the text use of grey so it looks less like something to click:



The below mockup more closely matches your current layout, but drops the separator and puts the text over on the right by the mode toggle button. Be aware that we are trying to preserver right button alignment (next to Stop) for the case of an inline help content button (see [2], [3]) but I think the below could still work if such help is added at some point:



One last comment on using an image counter... The Preview mode toolbar could really do with a "5 of 17" type display as you browse through them, but it looks like available space in that toolbar is pretty slim unless you shrink the name input field (and drop the second to last separator).

[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Finance_toolbar_3.png
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:TurtleBlocks_Toolbar_6.png

Thanks for all the effort you've put in, I manage to take some nice images with the extra controls (not of the Moon through a monocular yet, but maybe soon).

Regards,
--Gary
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-14.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 3690 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0010.tiff>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-2.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 3344 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0011.tiff>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-3.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 4618 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0012.tiff>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-4.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 3586 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0013.tiff>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-5.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 6730 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0014.tiff>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-6.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 3704 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0015.tiff>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-15.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 3620 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0016.tiff>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-8.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 4174 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0017.tiff>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-9.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 3880 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0018.tiff>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-10.tiff
Type: image/tiff
Size: 4216 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0019.tiff>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: XoScope-toolbar1.png
Type: image/png
Size: 18565 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0002.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: XoScope-toolbar2.png
Type: image/png
Size: 18603 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20110923/8931af09/attachment-0003.png>