Good User Interface Design


Dina

Still Fresh
Joined
Jan 24, 2011
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11
Hi everyone,


Although I've only just registered on here, I have been watching the boards a lot and ordered my Pandora ages ago.


I have a question for all of you concerning user interface design and layout...


For my dissertation at university, I am researching the importance of a friendly, efficient user interface in mobile operating systems. This touches on how a UI such as this is achieved and the problems of current applications and such...I'm sure you get the drift.


Although I'm mainly looking at this with Android in mind I thought that you lot might have some good ideas, points or just areas for discussion that may help me out :)


Obviously, its a bit different as you have the added precision with the use of a stylus, a nice big screen, multiple input methods, etc but I thought, really we're likely to come across similar sort of problems.


So, what do you think makes a good user interface? What problems do any of you have with respect to user input, and displaying data on screen in a nice easy-on-the-eye manner and anything else you can think of?


Really, I just want to get some opinions from people that are out there using these sorts of devices as well as the Pandora of course.


Anyways,


Thanks
 
I'm new to linux and yet found the Pandora to be intuitive (which is a good thing as they billed it that way). There are some OS problems given the small display but these will iron out as time goes on. The multiple input options the Pandora offers means even if a piece of the hardware fails, there is usually another way of doing things just as intuitively.
 
I'm new to linux and yet found the Pandora to be intuitive (which is a good thing as they billed it that way). There are some OS problems given the small display but these will iron out as time goes on. The multiple input options the Pandora offers means even if a piece of the hardware fails, there is usually another way of doing things just as intuitively.

Can you give me an example of the type of OS problems given the small display. I mean is it because of the limitation of the size of the screen? If so, how do you mean that they will be ironed out if its a physical limitation. The multiple input options is a good point. I really can't wait for my Pandora. Heh
 
Well, the Pandora's UI is just xfce's, basically if you have ever used windows then you can navigate the UI. It is pretty simple, there is the mini menu but I think everyone is using is xfce.


So basically it is like taking the UI of windows, task bar, start menu, ect, and putting it on a small screen. It can't get any more simple than that if you ask me.
 
Oh, and there's much less room for icons on the desktop, so you're better off keeping it clean.
 
Full screen terminal with a highly orthogonal scripting language and optional colour highlighting to show file semantics.
 
Full screen terminal with a highly orthogonal scripting language and optional colour highlighting to show file semantics.

You just described my favourite interface.


I find the Open Pandora user base interesting, because the user base is composed of people that would use command line interface solely to people that have no clue what a command line is.
 
For my dissertation at university, I am researching the importance of a friendly, efficient user interface in mobile operating systems. This touches on how a UI such as this is achieved and the problems of current applications and such...I'm sure you get the drift.
May I know what exactly it is that you are studying (in other words, how much you know about user interface design etc.) and what your reason is for choosing the Pandora forum to ask for people's experiences?
 
Can you give me an example of the type of OS problems given the small display. I mean is it because of the limitation of the size of the screen? If so, how do you mean that they will be ironed out if its a physical limitation. The multiple input options is a good point. I really can't wait for my Pandora. Heh
The screen is 480 pixels in height. That's the main limitation as we are using desktop software. Most of them works realy fine even with this size. But crowded dialog like some configs ones dont fit in height and need to be dragged to acces to their lower part. So far the only software I found to be limited by this is pencil (well it's managable, but not realy confortable).


To iron this you'll need to move some options to an other tab/part of the configuration dialog. But I'm not sure it will be ironed out...
 
The screen is 480 pixels in height. That's the main limitation as we are using desktop software. Most of them works realy fine even with this size. But crowded dialog like some configs ones dont fit in height and need to be dragged to acces to their lower part. So far the only software I found to be limited by this is pencil (well it's managable, but not realy confortable).


To iron this you'll need to move some options to an other tab/part of the configuration dialog. But I'm not sure it will be ironed out...

I had the same sort of issues when I first got my EeePC 701. It also has an 800x480 screen (though that screen is physically larger than what the Pandora has) The apps that gave me the most trouble were Firefox and Thunderbird at first, since the configuration dialogues were designed with a lot more vertical space in mind. The bottom of the dialogue box would be there, but some of the content was hidden below the viewable area and the area is not scrollable.


Edit: it didn't help that the default themes are not particularly friendly to small screens, needless to say I changed the themes pretty quickly.


The other one that springs immediately to mind with a similar issue was in the package manager Synaptic, where the button you had to click to confirm that you really did want to install these packages could only be reached by moving the top of the dialogue box off the top of the screen so you could see the bottom of it instead. I suspect users of Stuckie's debian extend may have noticed this on the pandora too.
 
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Has anybody experimented with virtual desktop resolutions which exceed the actual screen resolution? I always annoys me on my desktop, but it might be more convenient than having to alt-drag windows to reach an ok button.
 
Has anybody experimented with virtual desktop resolutions which exceed the actual screen resolution? I always annoys me on my desktop, but it might be more convenient than having to alt-drag windows to reach an ok button.


Actually yes, in a crude fashion, again it was on my EeePC 701. Some smart cookie in the Eeeuser forums posted a script that would setup VNC to run a server on a virtual X desktop and a client set to scale it. Ahh - here it is. If VNC is available on the Pandora (which I seem to recall being the case) it could probably be adapted, I found it tolerable for some things, less so for others. It's been a while since I had to worry about it though so I couldn't be more specific. I do seem to recall eventually giving it up as a not being worth the bother.


While looking for that though I discovered that someone has since got an actual scaling video driver working under linux, here, which I expect would make for a much clearer image. I expect something similar could be done for the Pandora, but whether the results would be worth the effort is another matter. :)
 
Actually Dina, I think a "good user interface" is subjective: it depends which customers it targets, and which product we're talking about. For example, the Pandora clearly targets techno-geeks and people who like to get involved in tweaking / hacking / modding their UI, hence the Linux OS and the ability to customise it your way. As opposed, for example, as an iPhone, that targets more "fashion aware" customers who generally don't know shit about computers and don't want to spend hours tweaking their device look and feel. They just want it to work out of the box and look good. Although you can jailbreak an iPhone and make it work more or less like you want, it's clearly not the original intent, and clearly not his main strength.


(I personally own a Pandora and an iPhone, and I like them both, for different reasons).
 
Actually yes, in a crude fashion, again it was on my EeePC 701. Some smart cookie in the Eeeuser forums posted a script that would setup VNC to run a server on a virtual X desktop and a client set to scale it. Ahh - here it is. If VNC is available on the Pandora (which I seem to recall being the case) it could probably be adapted, I found it tolerable for some things, less so for others. It's been a while since I had to worry about it though so I couldn't be more specific. I do seem to recall eventually giving it up as a not being worth the bother.


While looking for that though I discovered that someone has since got an actual scaling video driver working under linux, here, which I expect would make for a much clearer image. I expect something similar could be done for the Pandora, but whether the results would be worth the effort is another matter. :)
That's not really what I meant. In X you can configure your desktop to be larger than your actual screen resolution. Whenever you press your mouse against the edges of your screen it will pan your desktop to view the other area. This way you can see larger windows, just not the entire window at the same time.


E.g. you can set your virtual desktop size to 800x600 and then your desktop will pan to show either the top 800x480, the bottom 800x480 or anywhere in between.


Let's see if I can find a video...something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2sG7Y5VVhU.


Sorry for going a bit off-topic Dina, but it is user-interface related.
 
For my dissertation at university, I am researching the importance of a friendly, efficient user interface in mobile operating systems. This touches on how a UI such as this is achieved and the problems of current applications and such...I'm sure you get the drift.
May I know what exactly it is that you are studying (in other words, how much you know about user interface design etc.) and what your reason is for choosing the Pandora forum to ask for people's experiences?

I'm studying BSc Computer Science. I don't know an awful lot about UI design however this is one of the reasons for choosing this particular topic. I wanted to discover the limitations of programming and UI design for mobile devices and how these limitations are overcome.


I have not only chosen the Pandora forum to ask, I will also be asking the Android community, I just thought that it would be likely that a lot of the issues that smartphones have would be common to the Pandora as well. Also I thought it might be nice to do a little comparison with the different technologies and to include a Pandora in my dissertation. :D


And Theo, you have a point. The main focus of my report is going to be based on Android which although is becoming a mainstream mobile OS, it is also incredibly hackable so I suppose you have to take both sides into account.
 
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And Theo, you have a point. The main focus of my report is going to be based on Android which although is becoming a mainstream mobile OS, it is also incredibly hackable so I suppose you have to take both sides into account.
I've done a lot of UI coding in my professional life (although I didn't specifically study it at university), mostly in Java Swing and Web-based solutions (PHP, JSP/Struts/Webwork, CSS), and the main thing I've learned for a successful UI is: if you don't know your target users, you'll fail.


As for Android, I'd say it's probably halfway between the Pandora and something like iOS. That's why it's so difficult to get it right: you can never satisfy everyone :)
 
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I've got the tools, I just don't know how to *use* them!


I looked at angstrom's x11vnc-xinit script (which is installed on Pandora), the script in that link, and successfully created a local copy of the session...


EEEPC Script


angstrom-x11vnc-xinit


I followed the second echo line from the angstrom script more than the other one.


But it was the same session I was doing this from, so infinite loop, and no way around it.


I need to start a second display on :1 but am having issues.


1) /etc/X11/Xsession doesn't exist


2) DISPLAY=:1 xfce4-session either replaces the current :0 session, or fails


3) There are GAZILLIONS of possible parameters to x11vnc, it's a bit overwhelming


Once we can get :1 up it'll be easy to use Remmina to connect, and a scaled-down higher res screen on Pandora will be possible.


Any help?


Edit: Sorry...I forgot entirely I was using search when I found this post. Didn't even check the dates until I thought of it somewhere else.
 
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