[jboss-dev-forums] [Design of JBoss Portal] - Re: First pass UI improvements

[chris.laprun@jboss.com]

"cdelashmutt" wrote : Am I an authority in usability?  By no means.  Can I quote leading usability experts as to the validity of my suggestions?  Nope.
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  | I'm simply approaching this from the perspective of a user trying to understand and use the portal, which is all that I really can do.  ;)

I am not trying to belittle your work. This is much appreciated in particular with respect to finding out all the different inconsistencies in the GUI. However, our usability problems are not going to go away with just that. People have started to work on the issues you've identified and some of their fixes result in new inconsistency. I'm trying to make sure we get the proper help from someone who really knows about this stuff to provide solutions to the problems you identified so that we don't end up in an lengthy loop of modifications that could very well end up in not improving the GUI that much.

"cdelashmutt" wrote : In reference to the icons suggestion, I have a couple of reasons for suggesting them.  First off, the text links seem to run together even with the pipe separators.  One has to stop/think/interpret the text to understand which action they may want to take.  People respond better to icons, or even text that looks more like an icon (buttons with adequate padding, etc).  We could consider having icons with text next to them, similar to toolbar buttons, or for consistency's sake we could use a dropdown list and a "Go" button similar to the way CMS does it's functions if no one likes the icon idea.

People might respond better to icons, I don't know. What I know is that if they do, they will probably if the icons are well designed and meaningful and this is something that is extremely hard to do. Plus, icons are not an end in themselves. In particular, even if we do end up using icons/colors/whatever, we need to make sure that whatever information we convey degrades properly and that's another hard task that we, developers, are not fit for. Not that we're not interested about it (I know I am) or that we couldn't learn about it. We simply don't have time considering that we're also supposed to add features, improve performance and fix bugs...

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