Over here at Denison we've talked about making changes to the
Bricolage UI. Most of these changes revolve around streamlining the
story profile or admin sections.
Let's start with the story profile. The *vast* majority of our users
just care about the content section. They do not change output
channels, they don't add or subtract contributors, and they rarely
change category. Ideally, we feel that the initial view of the story
profile should be stripped down to just the content section, the
preview link, and the controlling links. It would be similar to the
old element profile screen, but even more stripped down.
How could that be accomplished? One idea that we have had is
eliminating the breadcrumbs at the top of the page since they are not
very useful in practice, and replacing them with app-style dropdown
menus. Clicking on one could show a hidden div with the interface
window for . So we'd have
Information
Categories
Output Channels
Contributors
Keywords
And you could even break down the information one more into one or two
more tabs.
Regarding the Admin section, every single initial page is a search box
with a results list below it - quite simple, really. We've toyed with
the idea of moving the menu up to the top of the screen - placing
Admin, Publishing, and Distribution directly below the MyWorkSpace
link, and then placing the submenus along the top of the screen as
opposed to being a drop down. At some level it's just moving things
around, but it would make it more natural to the user by being at the
top, and its location less subject to how many workflows are in a
typical install. After that, I think there's work that could be done
to style those aspects of the interface and make them more sexy.
Obviously these changes aren't going to make it into 2.0 even if we
develop them to the point of good ideas, but what we would like to
explore for 2.0 is putting the majority of the "Information" section
into a div that gets shown or hidden much like the advanced search
feature now does in 2.0. It looks like it would be relatively simple
to do, and would keep Bricolage trainers from having to tell users to
"scroll down" every time they want to do something.
I'm interested to hear what others think - I know that Mr. Lanning in
particular has recently voiced frustration with the ui. So let's
start a discussion about where we want to take the ui in the future.
As an aside, the Bricolage CSS is a nightmare - you know the Seinfeld
episode where Jackie is trying to sue the cigarette companies and
describes Kramer as a goblin? Yeah, that. The main css file is 27kb
and overloaded with selectors that are overly specific and far too
many !importants. We found out just how difficult it was to work with
when we redid the desk-item buttons. I recently reorganized the
Denison CSS (which was a lurching monstrosity in its own right) along
the lines of this blog entry -
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20080515/css-organization-and-efficiency/
Following a lot of the guidelines, we cut our CSS size by about 60%
and made it much more readable. If nobody has objection, I'll take a
stab at the bricolage css in the same manner in the near future. That
would would make future UI changes easier to implement.
-Matt
Bricolage UI. Most of these changes revolve around streamlining the
story profile or admin sections.
Let's start with the story profile. The *vast* majority of our users
just care about the content section. They do not change output
channels, they don't add or subtract contributors, and they rarely
change category. Ideally, we feel that the initial view of the story
profile should be stripped down to just the content section, the
preview link, and the controlling links. It would be similar to the
old element profile screen, but even more stripped down.
How could that be accomplished? One idea that we have had is
eliminating the breadcrumbs at the top of the page since they are not
very useful in practice, and replacing them with app-style dropdown
menus. Clicking on one could show a hidden div with the interface
window for . So we'd have
Information
Categories
Output Channels
Contributors
Keywords
And you could even break down the information one more into one or two
more tabs.
Regarding the Admin section, every single initial page is a search box
with a results list below it - quite simple, really. We've toyed with
the idea of moving the menu up to the top of the screen - placing
Admin, Publishing, and Distribution directly below the MyWorkSpace
link, and then placing the submenus along the top of the screen as
opposed to being a drop down. At some level it's just moving things
around, but it would make it more natural to the user by being at the
top, and its location less subject to how many workflows are in a
typical install. After that, I think there's work that could be done
to style those aspects of the interface and make them more sexy.
Obviously these changes aren't going to make it into 2.0 even if we
develop them to the point of good ideas, but what we would like to
explore for 2.0 is putting the majority of the "Information" section
into a div that gets shown or hidden much like the advanced search
feature now does in 2.0. It looks like it would be relatively simple
to do, and would keep Bricolage trainers from having to tell users to
"scroll down" every time they want to do something.
I'm interested to hear what others think - I know that Mr. Lanning in
particular has recently voiced frustration with the ui. So let's
start a discussion about where we want to take the ui in the future.
As an aside, the Bricolage CSS is a nightmare - you know the Seinfeld
episode where Jackie is trying to sue the cigarette companies and
describes Kramer as a goblin? Yeah, that. The main css file is 27kb
and overloaded with selectors that are overly specific and far too
many !importants. We found out just how difficult it was to work with
when we redid the desk-item buttons. I recently reorganized the
Denison CSS (which was a lurching monstrosity in its own right) along
the lines of this blog entry -
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20080515/css-organization-and-efficiency/
Following a lot of the guidelines, we cut our CSS size by about 60%
and made it much more readable. If nobody has objection, I'll take a
stab at the bricolage css in the same manner in the near future. That
would would make future UI changes easier to implement.
-Matt