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

[Tuomas Airaksinen <tuma@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Firstly, I want to thank you for these early comments :)

On Sun, Mar 04, 2001 at 07:36:08PM +0000, Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa wrote:
> 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.

There is no space for them, so they must be on their own page. Anyways,
it's better than having many buttons which open new windows each.

> Changing worker placement/specialists.        (this is ok in your design)
> Changing production.

Shouldn't be a problem, with one click you are in worklist.

> The sale of city improvements etc.

This should be okay for you too!

> No keyboard accelerators.

Yet! It's not by no means finished.

> === 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.

I have planned to add frames there (see my original design).

> 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).

"Act" is temporary, of course. I'll remove it and add new menu for 
unit list commands.

> 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?

Of course. I wouldn't be pleased to play with unfinished city dialog ! :-D 

> Looks aren't everything.  Try playing a few games with your design to see

But practicality is, and that's the reason I began with this.

> 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.

It is now, but I quess it wont be...

> 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.

New citydialog is gtk-only, so no glade libraries are necessary.

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

Yep :)

-- 
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