On 11/15/2012 07:57 PM, JaromÃr Coufal wrote:
Good morning/afternoon/evening to all
(you can choose your time-zone)
On our Aeolus Developer Conference I introduced new concept of Conductor
UI. When I wanted to use versioning to distinguish it from current one,
I realized that it would be better just to call it "new generation" :)
With this e-mail I would like to follow up with more details to the
first stage of our change - navigation restructuring.
====
Goals
====
- Make user oriented in the system
- Allow user to quick navigate through the system
- Show to user as much as possible within at least steps as possible
(but don't overwhelm him)
- Don't get user lost (at least not easily)
- If user gets lost recover him fast
This is good stuff Jaromir. My only concern, as you alluded to, is it's
a bit of a "start from scratch" approach. If we can do that, wonderful!
But if it's too big a hill to climb then could we make these changes
more iteratively?
I recently posted some possible approaches[1]. The concepts are much
less specific than yours. (I'm not a designer!)
1. Is it really a navigation problem or rather not taking advantage of
our table widget model? It seems we don't display enough information so
we end up with many page views, therefore confusing the user. Your
solution addresses this nicely and my proposal is to apply this
throughout the site.
2. Clean up and consolidate permissions management
3. Remove monitoring redundancy
4. Clean up UI antipatterns
Regarding the "skin", could we not just update the design of how the
current tabs are displayed and achieve the same results? For example,
under Users we have tabs Users, User Groups and Permissions.
-Aaron
[1]
http://blog.aeolusproject.org/rethinking-the-ui-part-1-actions-table/
=====
Solution
=====
-> Two level navigation
* First tier = logical grouping of elements
* Second tier = elements themselves in sections (all of them)
- User always knows where he is (always highlighted item in 1st and 2nd
tier).
- Just by 3 clicks (listing through 1st tier), user can overview all
accessible sections.
- It takes just 2 clicks to get to any full list of elements (e.g. list
of Images)
- It takes just 3 clicks to get to any detail of any element in the
system. (e.g. detail of an Image)
- If user looks for some section, he knows he can always find it in 2nd
tier (nowhere else).
======
Structure
======
*Cloud Environments*
(everything related to active content)
- Overview
- Cloud Environments
- Resource Zones
- AppForms
*Catalog*
(everything related to passive content)
- Catalogs
- AppForm Outlines
- Images
- Hardware Profiles
*Cloud providers*
- Cloud Providers
- Accounts
- Realms
- Provider Selection
- (Cost Estimates)
*Users*
- User groups
- Users
- Permissions
=====
Concept
=====
- *Dashboard* will not be part of navigation. It is specific page with
purpose to inform user about current state of system and what happened
when he was out. User will mostly work with this page just after logging
in not during further use of our system. This means, that Dashboard will
be a launch (home) page right after login. It is common and very widely
used usability feature, that logo brings you to homepage; in our case it
wouldn't be different, logo will bring you back to Dashboard.
- Under each item from the second tier is list of all its elements in
table view
- There is one exception - first page of Cloud Environemnts = Overview
(currently will be substituted by Monitor page)
==========
Implementation
==========
Currently we are missing following table views:
- Cloud Environments
- Resource Zones
- AppForms
- AppForm Outlines
- Provider Accounts
- Provider Selection
Other views are already implemented, so we can just relocate them with
very small adjustments.
(Details in link below Summary section)
======
Summary
======
Here is summary of the whole restructuring:
http://conductor.jaromircoufal.cz/new_conductor-ui_navigation-restructuri...
Here is image for preview of the structure:
http://conductor.jaromircoufal.cz/conductor_overview.png
If you made it this far, I would be really thankful to any reaction -
positive, negative, suggestions, if it makes sense to you, everything is
really welcome.
Looking forward to hearing from you
-- Jarda