[Beaker-devel] Reorganising the system page

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at redhat.com
Tue Dec 3 02:07:49 UTC 2013


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.html#beaker-usage-report-emails

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan
Red Hat Hosted & Shared Services
Software Engineering & Development, Brisbane

Testing Solutions Team Lead
Beaker Development Lead (http://beaker-project.org/)


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