RFC: Dive site UI

Thomas Pfeiffer thomas.pfeiffer at kde.org
Mon Apr 18 07:03:12 PDT 2016


On Montag, 18. April 2016 09:11:54 CEST Henrik Brautaset Aronsen wrote:
> Here's a proposal to simplify the dive site UI:
> 
> 
> When editing a dive:
> 
> 1) Disable inline editing of dive site name.  This avoids confusion around
> "rename dive site" vs "choose existing dive site with a different name"
> 
> 2) Instead add  "Edit..." and "Choose..." buttons next to the dive site
> name.  (See edit-dive.png)
> 
> 3) "Edit..." takes you to "Edit dive site". (Rename, edit coordinates etc)
> (See edit-dive-site.png)
> 
> 4) "Choose..." takes you to "Choose dive site", with a "Search" field and a
> "Create new site" button. (See choose-dive-site.png)
> 
> 5) "Create new site" takes you to "Create dive site" (similar to "Edit dive
> site").  (See create-dive-site.png)
> 
> When creating a new dive:
> 
> 6) The inline dive site edit should be disabled here as well, but add a
> "Create..." and "Choose..." button next to it.  (See new-dive.png)
> 
> 
> This should be fairly straight forward to implement in both the desktop and
> mobile UIs, since there is no magic and complex logic going on.

Hi, 
if I may chip in with some outside interaction designer perspective:

What I usually do when going about designing a UI (at least when I do it 
properly) is think "Who has which requirements regarding the user interface?"

So in this case, it seems that first of all, there are at least two kinds of 
users:
1) Those who want to group their dives by a set of fixed dive names
2) Those who don't 

Let's just pick completely random persona names to represent these users 
groups. Let's name the persona for group 1... hm... how about... Henrik? And 
for the other group... hmmmm... how about... Dirk? 

For persona Dirk, the task is simply: Just enter _something_ as the site name 
(heck, he might even leave it blank for all he cares, right?), it's not really 
important for him.
So he should not be bothered by the whole dive site selection any more than 
necessary.

Now to persona Henrik. What does he usually need to do when adding/editing a 
dive? My guess would be: 
a) Choose an existing dive site
b) Create a new one

Now there is one widget both in QWidgets and even in Qt Quick Controls which 
could help Henrik without making Dirk's life any harder: It's a Combobox which 
is set to "editable".

Dirk could just use it like a simple edit box, whereas Henrik could either 
choose an existing site using the drop-down or use the autocompletion feature 
to narrow down the list, or enter a new dive site name right in the box.

I don't think users would think that if they first choose an existing site and 
then change the name, they'd actually change the name of the existing site in 
the database, or do you think they would?

Of course then it would still make sense to have an option to actually edit 
existing dive sites, but that could be done elsewhere, since it's not a common 
task (or is it?).

If you have already considered and discarded that option before, I'm sorry for 
the noise. If not, this may be something to think about?

Cheers,
Thomas





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