KDE UX sprint 2011 ended up last Sunday in Berlin. I was really looking forward this sprint: I had quite a few ideas I wanted to discuss and was really enthusiast to have the occasion to meet Peter Sikking. In case you don’t know him, Peter is a User Interaction Architect, founder of man + machine interface works. Among other things, he is working with GIMP developers and has also helped Krita developers define their project vision.
Friday
We kicked off the sprint on Friday (late) morning with a round of introductions. On his turn, Sebas impressed anyone with the number of devices he managed to get out of his bag, all of them running Plasma Active. We then talked about QML and what impact it would have on the future before puting together a rough plan of what we would do during the sprint.
We split in different groups on Friday afternoon and a few of us dissected the idea of standardizing an emerging UI trend: modeless inline bars. These bars are used to:
- provide feedback (“User deleted”, “Invalid password”…)
- present what we called “opportunistic interactions”, for example bars like Firefox “Do you want to remember password for this site” bar
- create bottom “find” or “find and replace” bars
I came here with a very rough idea and was amazed at how Peter and his colleague Kate methodically broke it down to reconstruct it into a much more precise vision. I did not expect us to spend so much time on it, but I think I learned a lot from the discussion, both on the subject itself and on the way to approach such problems.
More details can be found on this wiki page. I started implementing it on Sunday evening. Here is a montage of what this early version looks like:
Implementation is in agateau/kmessagewidget branch of kdelibs, in kdeui/widgets/. Example program is in agateau/kmessagewidget branch of kdeexamples, in kmessagewidget/.
Saturday
K3b was the subject for Saturday morning… We discussed how we could make it easier for new users to get started on common tasks. The new version should be easier to use, and thanks to Nuno, beautiful. It’s not ready yet and will probably evolve, so no screenshot for now.
We switched to Calligra for the afternoon: Casper Boemann wanted to discuss ways to improve the main window layout of Calligra applications. It turned out to be quite difficult to define a layout which:
- works well on 4:3 and wide screens
- does not look too closely similar to Microsoft Office Ribbon
- is adapted to the various Calligra applications
Unfortunately, I am having trouble remembering the exact outcome of the discussion, I blame a lack of sleep/caffeine for that 
Sunday
Cyrille Berger, of Krita fame, got us started on Sunday morning with his idea of flexible UIs. The idea of getting widgets to adapt and eventually change their appearance to depending on the amount of screen space they can use. This is certainly interesting for widgets used in sidebars such as those found in Krita and other Calligra applications.
He presented an interesting demo showing list views which turned themselves into combo boxes or popup buttons if vertical or respectively horizontal space become too small. You can learn more on this wiki page and get the demo from here.
In the afternoon we switched to discussing “Activity-centered desktop” an idea from Björn Balazs (who worked on the design of Kontact Mobile). Björn idea is quite ambitious: make the computer smart enough to adapt its interface based on what the user wants to do. His example was the user writing a letter to a friend: in Björn vision, the user would be presented with a place to type his letter grouped with relevant entries from Akonadi address book. This interface would be different from the interface the computer would propose to the user if the recipient of a letter were, for example, an institution. In the long run, Björn envisions a system which would no longer work with separate applications, but rather non-ui components providing services and ui components based on the non-ui ones and assembled together to present adapted interfaces.
Will there are quite a few dark areas to me, in particular how the computer would guess the user needs, I think this vision has a lot of potential.
We wrapped up the day and the sprint with a discussion on how to continue cooperating to work on KDE user experience. Right now we have the kde-usability mailing list and the #kde-usability Freenode IRC channel. We used to have regular IRC meetings which we agreed were interesting and productive, Celeste said she was worried those meeting would not happen if she did not do the work to set them up (Bus factor is close to 1 there unfortunately). Nevertheless she agreed to resurrect them. I am happy to see the meetings coming back, as I really enjoyed them.
Finally, it was time to get back home, exhausted but delighted to have met so many nice people. My mind is even more filled with ideas for nice and usable user interfaces in KDE applications, time will tell if I can turn some of them into real code.
Thanks a lot to all the people involved in setting up this sprint, in particular to Celeste and to Relevantive for letting us use their amazing office for the time of the sprint!
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identi.ca
I’d propose something like this: (You need to fit it into a window/dialog of course):
http://privat.broulik.de/lula3.jpeg
and this “wedge” (i.e. that arrow/triangle) points to the respective item that emited the signal/message, so if you enter a wrong address in a adress book entry, a bar would appear above the respective input field, or in this case, you deleted a user and the list is what changed.
Or something like that. Maybe not entirely possible/suitable but I really like the style with that arrow/triangle, looks polished which would fit oxygen
The arrow looks indeed nice, but would be a bit more difficult to implement in a color-scheme-independent way. Will see what I can do.
Cyrille’s collapsible widgets idea is used to great effect in the user interface of Luxology’s Modo, which I’ve always found very pleasant to use. It’s a great app to be inspired by in terms of UI ideas: http://www.luxology.com/modo/
Did you discuss an standard way of removing the menubar?
Yes, we talked about this during the session about Calligra main windows. I don’t think we came to any definitive conclusion, though.
I like very much the ideas and the beautifull mockups presented here. In the mockup of BajK the left and right margin of the green box should be the same as for the box below it.
This was just an illustration
with a bit of fiddling in css margin settings. It is just to show the basic shape of it and i did not put much effort in adapting it 
It is basically a screenshot of a dialog created using kdialog set as background of a html div container and ontop of this I set the default notifications I use in my interface framework for basically all interface/web projects
It sounds like you all got some good work done.
One question, though. When you say that one goal for Calligra’s UI was to “not look too closely similar to Microsoft Office Ribbon”, what was the reasoning behind that? I don’t really take either side, but I’m curious why it was as specific goal here.
It is because apparently Microsoft has patented the Ribbon concept: one can use it in any applications except office suites… Software patent do not exist in many countries but it would be problematic if our applications were declared illegal in the US.
Ah yes, I’d forgotten about that. :/
Grr
Despite Ribbons being a totally crappy concept anyway, it’s funny to see that Kexi, a KDE office application, has adopted Ribbons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzv9M2_sLQc
Nevertheless, any Ribbon patents are invalid anyway because Borland Delphi 1.0 already had them which makes Delphi prior art.
I personally like a lot of the ideas behind the Ribbon, but I don’t think it works well for wide screens so Calligra need something else.
I tend to agree with that. Even with a 24” full hd it is annoying to have a ribbon bar.
Actually, I have a lot of more width than height available, making use of that makes more sense if you ask me. Considering that the documents I write on are usually not landscape, but portrait, it definitely makes more sense (at least for a text application as KWord, could be different for Krita though)
The question is of course the usability of a design, because basically, KWord tried something like this a while back (having “detail” controls on the right side), and for some reason I don’t know I dod not like that as well.
Also, I would point out that it comes down to whether Microsoft /can/ enforce their patent, not whether it technically should be enforceable. Given the state of US law these days, I wouldn’t want to risk it either.
Also I agree with Aurélien that it’s terrible on small (wide) screens.
MS can’t enforce anything against KDE. KDE only releases source codes and those are protected by the US constitution as free speech. MS could only sue US-bound distributors and all major ones are members of OIN which would promptly backfire at MS.
This is important work; thanks to all the designers, thinkers, + developers who made the time for this conference.
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