For bug 1014438 I am working on reorganising the system page to use space more efficiently and to make things easier to find.
Attached are two screenshots of my ideas.
The top section ("system at a glance") gives an overview of what the system is and its current state. The idea is to display the most commonly needed information and the most commonly performed actions at the top, in a compact layout. It occupies much less vertical space than the system form which currently appears at the top of the system page.
The three columns in the "at a glance" section are: description, health, and current usage. The health column has either a "Report problem" button or a "Remove from service" button according to context. Similarly the current usage column shows "Reserve", "Take", or "Request loan" according to context.
The tabs in the sidebar are all the familiar tabs that exist right now on the system page. There are also a few additions, to cover functionality that is currently crammed awkwardly into the system form. The rest remain largely unchanged so that this doesn't need to turn into a massive rewrite.
Let me know what you think.
On 12/02/2013 02:58 PM, Dan Callaghan wrote:
For bug 1014438 I am working on reorganising the system page to use space more efficiently and to make things easier to find.
+1 looks great to me :)
Cheers, Nick.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Callaghan" dcallagh@redhat.com To: "beaker-devel" beaker-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org Sent: Monday, December 2, 2013 2:58:34 PM Subject: [Beaker-devel] Reorganising the system page
For bug 1014438 I am working on reorganising the system page to use space more efficiently and to make things easier to find.
Attached are two screenshots of my ideas.
The top section ("system at a glance") gives an overview of what the system is and its current state. The idea is to display the most commonly needed information and the most commonly performed actions at the top, in a compact layout. It occupies much less vertical space than the system form which currently appears at the top of the system page.
The three columns in the "at a glance" section are: description, health, and current usage. The health column has either a "Report problem" button or a "Remove from service" button according to context. Similarly the current usage column shows "Reserve", "Take", or "Request loan" according to context.
The tabs in the sidebar are all the familiar tabs that exist right now on the system page. There are also a few additions, to cover functionality that is currently crammed awkwardly into the system form. The rest remain largely unchanged so that this doesn't need to turn into a massive rewrite.
Let me know what you think.
Looks great to me!
-Amit.
On 12/02/2013 05:58 AM, Dan Callaghan wrote:
For bug 1014438 I am working on reorganising the system page to use space more efficiently and to make things easier to find.
Attached are two screenshots of my ideas.
Hi Dan,
the design looks a bit more clean than the previous black/white version. I've spotted two things that I'd like to fit better. First is that "Report problem" and "Reserve" buttons are not aligned. Second is that "3 out of 72 recipes..." text could use some form of "4% aborted recipes (3 out of 72)".
I don't have a feeling that the space is used more efficiently. Especially on wide monitors top-down design is worse than the width-aligned menu previously. Also note the white space on the right (next to "System" and "CPU" tables). White space = not efficient. Comparing to the previous version I saw a lot more info in less clicks in the old version.
I'll share a raw thoughts on how to make the page look more efficent. It's a pity that you did not include the landing page for the system link, as I think that matters most.
My idea would be to have the basic/health info in one column (HP z200, intel, memory, disk) together with owner and current user. Next to it (second column), I'd like to have all actions that are allowed with the system (reserve, provision, power on/off/cycle, loan...). That would allow me to do most frequently actions in less clicks.
It would also be cool to have it customizable in a sense of blocks that would be displayed by default (but that's more like admin sugar then any widely-used functionality).
Cheers, Jaroslav.
On 12/02/2013 07:29 PM, Jaroslav Kortus wrote:
I don't have a feeling that the space is used more efficiently. Especially on wide monitors top-down design is worse than the width-aligned menu previously. Also note the white space on the right (next to "System" and "CPU" tables). White space = not efficient.
This is one of those cases where a lot of users' intuitions don't match up with usability research: cramming more information into a single screen by making it wider doesn't actually make it easier to use in general. This is why you see a lot more user interfaces these days that have a maximum viewport width, and the Beaker 0.15+ UI is one of them (although as of 0.15.1, we do allow the data tables to overflow when necessary - failing to do that and hence truncating the display of job results was one of the problems in the 0.15 release)
Comparing to the previous version I saw a lot more info in less clicks in the old version.
More isn't necessarily better though - how much of the old information did you actually *need* to achieve any given task? The Beaker 0.15+ UI is deliberately less dense at the widget level, so we're aiming to show people the information they need when they need it, rather than just dumping everything we have available onto the screen and calling it "good enough" (again, reducing visual density to avoid creating a general impression of noise and clutter is one of the general recommendations coming out of usability research)
I'll share a raw thoughts on how to make the page look more efficent. It's a pity that you did not include the landing page for the system link, as I think that matters most.
That page isn't fundamentally changing in Beaker 0.15 (aside from the general improvements to data table pagination), but yes, improving the system table is on our longer term hit list of things to improve given the better web UI tools that are available in Beaker 0.15+
One step at a time though - there are a lot of things that could stand to be improved in the web UI. The system details page is currently at the top of the list for UI improvements because I think it went backwards in usability between 0.14.x and 0.15.1, as the reduced visual density made existing usability issues more obvious. The job results page is similarly guilty of displaying redundant or uninteresting information by default, so that's currently flagged for closer scrutiny in 0.16.
My idea would be to have the basic/health info in one column (HP z200, intel, memory, disk) together with owner and current user. Next to it (second column), I'd like to have all actions that are allowed with the system (reserve, provision, power on/off/cycle, loan...). That would allow me to do most frequently actions in less clicks.
I like the "Action" column idea for the system table (similar to the one we have on the Jobs table), but it's out of scope for this update.
It would also be cool to have it customizable in a sense of blocks that would be displayed by default (but that's more like admin sugar then any widely-used functionality).
Having more than one data table on a page is certainly something that should be possible in the future - it wasn't practical given the limitations of the previous web UI toolkit :)
For example, something I would eventually like to see is a per-user "usage report" page in the web UI, with the info discussed in this usage email proposal for Beaker 0.16:
http://beaker-project.org/dev/proposals/time-limited-manual-reservations.htm...
Cheers, Nick.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Callaghan" dcallagh@redhat.com To: "beaker-devel" beaker-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org Sent: Sunday, December 1, 2013 11:58:34 PM Subject: [Beaker-devel] Reorganising the system page
For bug 1014438 I am working on reorganising the system page to use space more efficiently and to make things easier to find.
Attached are two screenshots of my ideas.
The top section ("system at a glance") gives an overview of what the system is and its current state. The idea is to display the most commonly needed information and the most commonly performed actions at the top, in a compact layout. It occupies much less vertical space than the system form which currently appears at the top of the system page.
The three columns in the "at a glance" section are: description, health, and current usage. The health column has either a "Report problem" button or a "Remove from service" button according to context. Similarly the current usage column shows "Reserve", "Take", or "Request loan" according to context.
The tabs in the sidebar are all the familiar tabs that exist right now on the system page. There are also a few additions, to cover functionality that is currently crammed awkwardly into the system form. The rest remain largely unchanged so that this doesn't need to turn into a massive rewrite.
Let me know what you think.
Dan, Not sure this is the correct time to ask. But even on the current interface the Hypervisor field is a misnomer. Looking at your current page. I get the impression that this system could not run virt jobs. Which is not the case, Virt jobs depend on a keyvalue pair HVM = 1. IMO I think we should change the name of that field to Virtualization or Virtualized.
I especially like the "Out of Service" and the "Loan to" information at the top. Is there an API talking to RT or is the information displayed at the top in the comments?
Thanks, Jeff
-- Dan Callaghan dcallagh@redhat.com Software Engineer, Hosted & Shared Services Red Hat, Inc.
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Excerpts from Jeffrey Burke's message of 2013-12-03 01:03:04 +1000:
Not sure this is the correct time to ask. But even on the current interface the Hypervisor field is a misnomer. Looking at your current page. I get the impression that this system could not run virt jobs. Which is not the case, Virt jobs depend on a keyvalue pair HVM = 1. IMO I think we should change the name of that field to Virtualization or Virtualized.
The "Hypervisor" field is supposed to be short for "Type of hypervisor which this system is running inside of, if any". But I agree the name is ambiguous. I've filed a bug for it:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1037280
I especially like the "Out of Service" and the "Loan to" information at the top. Is there an API talking to RT or is the information displayed at the top in the comments?
The screenshots were just a mock-up which I produced by editing the HTML by hand, there's no code behind them yet. Integration with RT has been talked about for a long time but I wasn't planning to tackle it. The "out of service" message would be the existing "Condition report" field, a message which the admin fills in when they mark the system as broken. Although I have been thinking it might make sense to get rid of "Condition report" and use system notes instead. For the "out of service" message it could just display the most recent system note.
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