[Sugar-devel] [Design] BulletinBoard feedback

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Walter,

Finally had a chance to have a play with your Bulletin Board-2 activity [1][2] and just wanted to pass along some quick design related feedback from my first impressions:

- The default view for the activity feels like it should be Thumbnail view, not Slide view. Instantly presenting a user with a 'Bulletin Board' like view of the activity showing numerous thumbnails pinned to the screen makes the activity intent more obvious. Slide & Thumb primary toolbar icon positions should swap if Thumb becomes the default view.

- The canvas fill colour should be a neutral light grey or white, the two colour fill/stroke border frames around the thumb images are strong enough already to clearly see the owners custom fill/stroke colours. I was pretty swamped with some un-expected user choice of lurid colour fullscreen ;)

- The 'Update description' tool in the primary toolbar is rather confusing with regard to the similar functionality and similar icon in the Activity secondary toolbar 'Description'. Suggestion; drop the primary toolbar tool 'Update description' and make the description text areas editable on the main canvas below each slide. It can have a subtle help hint in the input area where a description text is empty, tempting folks to interact (e.g. the standard Description icon with some hint text next to it, something like "Empty description" and a button marked "(+) Add description", as per an empty Journal search, or see Jukebox for a similar canvas use case, mockup here [3]).

- Ideally the Title on the canvas would also support editing (to match the above behaviour) so the Journal entry titles can be modified as well.

- [Bug] The 'Update description' tool in the primary toolbar was used to add a description to one slide, the same text was then in that palette for every other slide (the other slides had no descriptions of their own). The palette field only updates if there is description text already there, otherwise it shows previously displayed stale text.

- In thumbnail view can a single click interaction switch to Slide view for that slide.

- Is there any way to transfer a specific shared entry into your own Journal rather than just viewing low-res thumbnails, or is this out of the scope of the activity?

- My expectation for the audio recording feature was that there could be an audio recording per slide, so you could navigate through and hear a description of each slide. It appears to be a single audio recording which is over written if you record again, requiring manual navigation of the slides if it is intended as a narration. If audio recording can be per slide, the 'buddy with speak bubble' icons could appear on the main canvas in the text description area, rather than the secondary toolbar, to allow playback of the different recordings from each collaborator for each slide).

- [Bug] Audio recording only produced a series of clicking echo like audio feedback (tested on an XO-1.75)

- [Bug] Main canvas does not re-scale or re-centre. Opening secondary toolbars pushes the description area slightly off screen, and rotating the screen causes a grey area of undrawn canvas at the bottom and the main content to partially disappear off the right side of the display.

- [Bug] Still trying to examine this one so apologies for vagueness. Sharing issues using two XO-1.75 running latest 12.1 build 18 on a local network, with no collaboration server defined. Share from 1st machine with 6 item starred; join activity from Neighbourhood view on 2nd machine with no items shared; result is 2nd machine showns the warning about having no items starred; stop both activities; star a few Journal items on 2nd machine; resume activity on 1st machine; join activity from Neighbourhood view on 2nd; result, 1st machine still just sees its own starred items, 2nd machine see only its own starred items. The machine joining the other displayed the other in the right Frame buddy area, but the initial sharing machine did not see the other in the right Frame buddy area (I tried this a couple of times starting with different machines first).

- [Bug] Given the above, I was not sure what the "Refresh" tool was for in the Activity secondary toolbar, I clicked it a number of different times in different situations (starring extra items in my Journal after beginning the activity, after trying to collaborate). From the wiki I guess this is intended for case 2 rather than case 1 (rescan of journal starred items).

- [Bug] (After testing with a 3rd XO-1 on 12.1 build 18 I managed to see share working) Thumb view shows incomplete state if the activity is in the progress of synchronising with another's slides when you switch to it. Should show a loading or progress bar if state is incomplete (or a spinner if you're not sure how many items are to by synched). If the number of items is known, you could open blank thumb containers with spinners or a loading message in each so that the Thumb view layout is not compromised (I had one case where I had a single partially blank slide stretched over the whole thumb view and off the screen vertically some distance).

- [Bug] Refresh has no visible effect, you have to manually toggle back and forth between Slide view and Thumbs view to see the extra slides redraw in the Thumb view.

Regards,
--Gary

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Bulletinboard
[2] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4588
[3] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/attachment/ticket/3714/Jukebox_playlist_functional_and_informational.png