On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Luca Anca <lucaa@xwiki.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I've got some suggestions that the current way of editing the dashboard is not really intuitive (Edit -> Inline Form),

That should be only true for advanced users, and regular users should just have to press "edit". Otherwise that's inconsistent with the way "inline" mode means for other pages. Which would be wrong in my opinion, and edit -> customize would be more suited. Otherwise, I'm not a big fan of the "customize this dashboard" message, button. Maybe a gear symbol with "customize this dashboard" as alt / title would work. But the button should remain very light if any I think. Jerome

and mainly because users wouldn't necessarily look under "Edit" for a method to change the dashboard. Also, other users that I've observed, forgot that they need to go in some edit mode before changing things.

I also agree that without documentation no user would figure out that editing a dashboard is under Edit -> Inline Form. While editing will still remain "in inline mode", from the technical pov, we need to provide a easier way for users to discover this.

Let's look at the following options:

1/ Add a "Customize" menu entry under edit, in the page menu, as proposed in the mockups from Cati, a long time ago: http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/GadgetsDashboard .

2/ Add a "Customize this dashboard" button in the dashboard in view mode, in the top right corner, something like http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Design/GadgetIntegration/oldDashboar... but styled better to integrate with the current dashboard.

3/ Define and implement a mechanism to allow the inline form edit to be triggered for a document without that document having to include a document which has an object in it. E.g. as Vincent proposed at one point, trigger inline mode when an object is present in the current document.

I should note that solutions 1 and 3 still assume that the user will go to "Edit" to try to customize the dashboard, which can also be problematic (I cannot figure it out for sure right now, we need fresh users or proper UX expertise which I don't have).

WDYT?

Thanks, Anca

_______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 18:26, Luca Anca <lucaa@xwiki.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I've got some suggestions that the current way of editing the dashboard is not really intuitive (Edit -> Inline Form), and mainly because users wouldn't necessarily look under "Edit" for a method to change the dashboard. Also, other users that I've observed, forgot that they need to go in some edit mode before changing things.

I also agree that without documentation no user would figure out that editing a dashboard is under Edit -> Inline Form. While editing will still remain "in inline mode", from the technical pov, we need to provide a easier way for users to discover this.

Let's look at the following options:

1/ Add a "Customize" menu entry under edit, in the page menu, as proposed in the mockups from Cati, a long time ago: http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/GadgetsDashboard.

2/ Add a "Customize this dashboard" button in the dashboard in view mode, in the top right corner, something like

http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Design/GadgetIntegration/oldDashboar... styled better to integrate with the current dashboard.

3/ Define and implement a mechanism to allow the inline form edit to be triggered for a document without that document having to include a document which has an object in it. E.g. as Vincent proposed at one point, trigger inline mode when an object is present in the current document.

I think 3) is needed. When I saw the first time the new dashboard: - I pressed "Edit", was kind of confused that it got me to WYSIWYG mode - went back to "Edit" menu, looked for the "Inline" option, remembered that the new action menu does not have an "Inline" option in "Edit" mode (can't remember why) - went back to view mode and selected (having the "advanced" edit menu) "Inline". About 1), if we fix 3) this option will not be necessary. I don't know still how intuitive "Inline" wording is, compared to this use case, or any other use case actually. About 2): we have something similar already in the platform for the user profile info, and more recently for the user avatar. If we decide to also add this fallback mechanism we should use similar style. Thanks, Caty

I should note that solutions 1 and 3 still assume that the user will go to "Edit" to try to customize the dashboard, which can also be problematic (I cannot figure it out for sure right now, we need fresh users or proper UX expertise which I don't have).

WDYT?

Thanks, Anca

_______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

On 03/22/2011 05:26 PM, Luca Anca wrote:

Hi all,

I've got some suggestions that the current way of editing the dashboard is not really intuitive (Edit -> Inline Form), and mainly because users wouldn't necessarily look under "Edit" for a method to change the dashboard. Also, other users that I've observed, forgot that they need to go in some edit mode before changing things.

I also agree that without documentation no user would figure out that editing a dashboard is under Edit -> Inline Form. While editing will still remain "in inline mode", from the technical pov, we need to provide a easier way for users to discover this.

Let's look at the following options:

One important thing to keep in mind is that most users don't have a submenu under Edit, just the one top menu entry.

1/ Add a "Customize" menu entry under edit, in the page menu, as proposed in the mockups from Cati, a long time ago: http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/GadgetsDashboard .

Doesn't work for simple users.

2/ Add a "Customize this dashboard" button in the dashboard in view mode, in the top right corner, something like http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Design/GadgetIntegration/oldDashboar... but styled better to integrate with the current dashboard.

Best thing from a discoverability PoV, but stands in the way of a clean UI.

3/ Define and implement a mechanism to allow the inline form edit to be triggered for a document without that document having to include a document which has an object in it. E.g. as Vincent proposed at one point, trigger inline mode when an object is present in the current document.

I should note that solutions 1 and 3 still assume that the user will go to "Edit" to try to customize the dashboard, which can also be problematic (I cannot figure it out for sure right now, we need fresh users or proper UX expertise which I don't have).

Well, everything in XWiki should be editable this way. Users should learn this. Eventually they will look for an "Edit" link or button, and they will click on it. How does this fit with the idea that every user should have his own dashboard? The main homepage is problematic since it includes a dashboard defined somewhere else. It's wrong, IMO, to even offer to edit a dashboard that's somewhere else in the context of another document, using the edit mode of that document. It's like allowing to edit the {{include}}d documents. In conclusion, it depends on what is going to be edited. If the dashboard is supposed to be defined in the current document, then it should be edited inline using the normal edit button. If it's required to be able to edit dashboards that are just living inside a document, while their data resides someplace else, then the inline edit mode is completely wrong. It will mess with the rest of the page. In this case, a button inside the dashboard UI itself is best. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/

Actually, as I was starting to implement this, I realized that dashboard pages need to be edited in WYSIWYG mode as well, to modify the parameters of the dashboard (such as the style of the dashboard). Now, what we could do to fix that is to store the whole dashboard definition in an object as well (attached to the page) and use the dashboard macro only to pinpoint the position in the page. Then, we could provide UI in the dashboard visual editor for these parameters (change the style and / or layout). However, there is one parameter, source, which should still be a macro parameter since it tells where to read these objects from. Even so, is it OK that the simple users will only be able to edit a page that contains a dashboard in inline mode? e.g. if they have additional text on the page they'll need to become advanced users to be able to choose wysiwyg editing for that text, or if they want to change the parameters of the dashboard macro. I would like to have your opinion on this potential mixed editing need. Thanks, Anca On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 17:26 +0100, Luca Anca wrote:

Hi all,

I've got some suggestions that the current way of editing the dashboard is not really intuitive (Edit -> Inline Form), and mainly because users wouldn't necessarily look under "Edit" for a method to change the dashboard. Also, other users that I've observed, forgot that they need to go in some edit mode before changing things.

I also agree that without documentation no user would figure out that editing a dashboard is under Edit -> Inline Form. While editing will still remain "in inline mode", from the technical pov, we need to provide a easier way for users to discover this.

Let's look at the following options:

1/ Add a "Customize" menu entry under edit, in the page menu, as proposed in the mockups from Cati, a long time ago: http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/GadgetsDashboard .

2/ Add a "Customize this dashboard" button in the dashboard in view mode, in the top right corner, something like http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Design/GadgetIntegration/oldDashboar... but styled better to integrate with the current dashboard.

3/ Define and implement a mechanism to allow the inline form edit to be triggered for a document without that document having to include a document which has an object in it. E.g. as Vincent proposed at one point, trigger inline mode when an object is present in the current document.

I should note that solutions 1 and 3 still assume that the user will go to "Edit" to try to customize the dashboard, which can also be problematic (I cannot figure it out for sure right now, we need fresh users or proper UX expertise which I don't have).

WDYT?

Thanks, Anca

_______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs