[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Designing a new city dialog

[Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's nice that someone is taking the trouble to redesign some dialogs.
But the city dialog isn't the worst of them i'm affraid.  This redesign
you made has some rather serious usability problems IMO:

The tasks that ppl usually use the city dialog for should be more easily
acessible that other tasks.  This includes (in order of importance) from
my point of view:

Unit selection, etc.
Changing worker placement/specialists.  (this is ok in your design)
Changing production.
The sale of city improvements etc.

No keyboard accelerators.

=== More stuff

The worklist is confusing.  Which list is the production list? The one in
the right or the one in the left?  There are no labels whatsoever.  There
is this multitude of buttons not of all necessary.  I guess that's the
reason more people don't use worklists: the usability of the worklist
dialog stinks big time.  I know it wasn't you who made this but since it's
a redesign these issues must be solved.

What the hell does the "act" button in the units present list mean?  (I
know it's activate all units but you must agree not everyone would).


Before making a design and worrying of using "pretty" widgets like tabs
etc think yourself: if i played using this design would i feel annoyed
with something?  is there some way the design can be improved in usability
terms?

Looks aren't everything.  Try playing a few games with your design to see
if it fits.  If it doesn't change what you didn't like.  I did these kind
of mistakes too in the past but in the end i had to redesign them.  Since
you're redesigning the dialog anyway why not do it now?  It's not a good
idea to add a new design that's prettier than the old one but more
unusable.

We sort of copied the CivII design which is quite nice in terms of
usability in this dialog IMO.  But our city report dialog is better.

One other thing: i dunno if you're using Glade but if you are:
We don't want to depend on Glade for compiling Freeciv.  IIRC Glade has
some option to output C code and we'll have to use that when it's folded
into CVS. In the meantime you can use the method you're using now since
rapid prototyping is more important.


Don't despair!  All of the things i mentioned can be fixed more or less
easily. :-)

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa