Agreed with the UX criticisms -- scroll wheel is essential. And dragging isn't discoverable enough.
Interface generally is still a little rough: it wasn't clear to me how to enable scatter points (as well as lines) because it looked liked I'd chosen the scatter type/size/colour etc, but it turns out I hadn't enabled the "line+point" mode.
As far as I'm concerned, any graph element should be clickable and should bring up options to change it, e.g. the axes format. Lack of font options (webfonts maybe?) also a problem.
I clicked one of the examples, clicked "show data" and then clicked "plot data" expecting it to go back to the graph, but instead it wasn't really clear how to do that -- and then I saw the original graph was still there as a tab. I don't know if it was still linked to the data or if the data tab was just a copy -- I tried changing a random data point to test, when back to the graph, and it was stuck updating.
I only took the time to type up these criticisms/UX issues because I really, really like this product. The web is sorely in need of a great plotting solution and this looks really cool. Just a little rough around the edges, that's all!
Browser history is a must or at least some url paths to link to. Otherwise I have to keep going back to the metric menu for every action.
Each pages displays a whole lot of information. It's broken down nicely, but sometimes less information is more. Being able to focus on one type of graph/data rather then several blocks is easier.
The "plus" icon on some graphs expends and collapses (UI issue)
The UI colors seem really light. Might want to check for color contrast because I think this would fail accessibility.
A couple of suggestions for usability improvements:
1. Drag handling is buggy when I accidentally move the mouse outside of a box and then release. In that case it doesn't notice a mouse-up and the parameter gets stuck in the mouse-down state. Makes it difficult to draw in the leaf editor or to modify parameters by dragging them like sliders. Probably just need to register the mouse-up event handler on a common ancestor instead of the graph node editor boxes.
2. The little parameter "port" circles for dragging connections are a bit small, especially when zoomed out where you can see a significant portion of the whole scene. Usability would be improved by making them bigger (at least 25%?). It might just be the hit area that needs to be larger, not necessarily the graphical element.
Note: I'm using Firefox. Just tested in chromium and the mouse handler problem happens there as well but dragging to connect nodes seems a bit more usable in chromium.
It looks great to me, though the "recognize points of conflict early" slide was really confusing until I stared at it for a little bit.
On the mechanics side of thing, when I view the demo (using Opera 11), mousing over the average score bar next to names makes the horizontal black bar flicker a lot, which is really jarring.
The first graph actually seems redundant in light of the table with the names, average scores, and best areas; the table is the best display for me since all of the information is right there and easy to read. I kind of wish that instead of the bar graph, the pentagram were displayed above the table so that I could mouse over names and see the pentagram change, or select two (or more) people to have overlapping pentagrams for easy visual comparison.
The review matrix display seems slightly awkward because of the horizontal scroll.
Overall, this seems like a very useful tool!
Edit: The about page is really cluttered with lots of duplicate data...
- A bit annoying that the scrollwheel doesn't do anything; the natural thing would be for it to zoom in/out.
- There doesn't seem to be a way to resize an area by dragging an edge; you have to drag each corner individually, which seems to be error-prone.
- The default zoom level makes it hard to snap things to major gridlines, which exacerbates the issue with the lack of edge-dragging above (since it's harder than it should be to get the corners to line up horizontally or vertically).
If these issues could be fixed, I can see myself using this for day-to-day stuff.
1) Said before...Image upload into drawings would be nice
2) Adding clickable URLs in the text would also be nice
3) Different download option types, especially SVG, would be helpful so that it can be sent to people with Visio
4) Did not recognize a diamond shape, I use that all the time for flowcharts
5) Easier way to create lines that connect shapes. Again, i do this all the time when creating flow charts and it is sort of a pain to have to click the arrow icon. Maybe if I was using the right mouse button???
At a high level, I really like this. Some UX concerns are all that stop it from being amazing:
- The mouse should be a pointer, not a hand. Not only is that the expectation when an element is interactive, but it helps with precision clicking.
- The map almost made me sick when it starting moving. It needs to be slower and smoother. You already let people speed it up, but start slower.
- Dragging the map should be possible. I wanted to scroll back to something that had moved off-screen, and the map dragged a few pixels, then snapped back. If it is supposed to be draggable, let it drag. If not, don't let a drag start and then snap it back.
But really, those concerns aside, this is a nice tool.
A couple of things:
- Where are the pretty graphs? That's the first thing I expect from a dedicated reporting tool.
- When the UI has infinite scrolling, you need to make the footer sticky, or get rid of it entirely.
I'm in love with this idea but the interface is just so clunky. Clustering needs a bit of massaging and zooming in and out should be smoother. Also labels and clicking on places without opening a new page would be great.
This is really awesome. The UI/UX feels a little unapproachable and the feature set seems lacking (what do I do when I get to that page) , but I'm sure it's infinitely better than the alternative.
1. One downside of this interface is that it's difficult to keep track of where you are. The scroll metaphor is broken and the pagination metaphor is not fully implemented (you need an indicator of where you are, like pages in a real book). The percentage indicator doesn't cut it.
2. Control feels too fine. It's too easy to lose your place and mental effort needs to be devoted to properly placing the page divider. I would like to see a version that scrolls in discrete steps by line, perhaps with a little smoothing by way of animation. This would also give you a new feature: using the divider as a reading aid as people often do with rulers and real books.
Think of it this way: you have two controls, page turn and pixel-advance. What is a control with granularity somewhere between those interfaces that combines some of the advantages of both for navigating?
3. I'm not convinced by the divider. I think it either needs to communicate a visual metaphor, perhaps implying that the new page comes out on top of the current page using shadows, or just needs to be softer using blurring or fading the adjacent text out to white. And I don't think you should be able to cut a line of text in half (addressed in (2)).
This is nice! I like the graphs and the general feeling, and the utility is important as well. One minor UX tweak: remove the tile description text ellipsis and nowrap and just let it flow and wrap. Makes browsing the main page much better, otherwise I have to navigate into each tile and then back just to understand what it is about.
Thanks for the feedback. There is a lot of work that still needs to be done to improve the UI for these tools, but our goal is to build a library of such visual tools for tens of relevant topics.
A few thoughts for the online interface:
1) When dragging the time selection slider (below the stage chart), it doesn't move if your cursor moves out of the vertical bounds.
2) It wasn't apparent to me at first that you could toggle variables on the legend -- in fact I didn't even notice the legend right away (maybe make it a bit bigger, and a bit more obvious that it's toggle-able?)
3) The legend changes between vertical stack and inline based on how wide the window is, I'd prefer if it was vertical stacked all the time.
Indeed a nice interface, particularly the direct drag-n-drop to paragraph for attaching/embedding images.
A few bugs to report: 1. When I select some text the popup menu doesn't include a + button. 2. The hover menu for a picture has no expand button, only a shrink button. 3. Ctrl-Z doesn't allow me to undo deleting an image.
Some bike shedding: Your favicon is not very distinctive amongst 15 other tabs - perhaps add a W over the feather, or make the feather a white silhouette on black - to match your top bar. I accidentally clicked the cross when trying to drag an image - the hover menu appeared over an image, perhaps make the menu appear above/below the image (like the text menu does) to avoid a race condition.
Take these with a grain of salt though. I like it, but I'm not in the market to become a customer.
This is all intended to be constructive, I really like where you're going.
I signed up and began skimming around. Not sure if you're just overloaded with traffic or if your lightboxes are having a hard time loading, but I can't preview any of the themes at the moment. Half of the time the lightbox preloader isn't going away.
Also, please consider adding more hotkey bindings for things. I really would prefer using my mouse as little as possible. I was trying to delete elements only to find that the delete hotkey doesn't work.
Also, as mentioned by adityar, I'm not sure what to do with your charts section. I can't see how the data can be manipulated, if at all.
Lastly, your objects paginator isn't paginating for me. I click on another page, watch the increment, but the icons don't change.
Looks pretty cool... I like the idea of the one-to-one analytics tool, since other tools don't seem to do this (that I know of, at least).
However, one quick design point is the "Discover how people interact with your website" header is extremely hard to read since it's basically black on gray. Not sure if this is just my monitor's brightness levels or browser (Firefox 4.0.1), but I would recommend changing that up to be easier to read.
Other than that, I'm looking forward to checking it out more!
Interface generally is still a little rough: it wasn't clear to me how to enable scatter points (as well as lines) because it looked liked I'd chosen the scatter type/size/colour etc, but it turns out I hadn't enabled the "line+point" mode.
As far as I'm concerned, any graph element should be clickable and should bring up options to change it, e.g. the axes format. Lack of font options (webfonts maybe?) also a problem.
I clicked one of the examples, clicked "show data" and then clicked "plot data" expecting it to go back to the graph, but instead it wasn't really clear how to do that -- and then I saw the original graph was still there as a tab. I don't know if it was still linked to the data or if the data tab was just a copy -- I tried changing a random data point to test, when back to the graph, and it was stuck updating.
I only took the time to type up these criticisms/UX issues because I really, really like this product. The web is sorely in need of a great plotting solution and this looks really cool. Just a little rough around the edges, that's all!
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