Should Xara's interface change?

[Xhris]

Ok, it seems I opened a can of hornets, but I’d also like to add my thoughts. The vaguest mention of UI changes seems to have generated strong reactions suggesting people interpreted that as changes that affect functionality should be made. I’d like to make a distinction between two classes of interface change: changes that affection functionality (which I'm dubbing ‘hard’ changes), and changes that affect the superficial gloss and look of the UI (‘soft’ changes). (I'm sure somewhere on TG in the past I've made this kind of distinction and talked about it, but I couldn’t find it; so maybe I didn’t.)

Dealing with each classification separately:

Hard changes:
There are areas in Xara’s UI that are poor (and even Xara knows it)—such as the way in which galleries are handled. In the previous post, I mentioned Microsoft Visual Basic Express 2008, and was only kudos-ing its gallery handling methodology—gallery handling being the area Xara knows is particularly weak and the area in which I would say was in the greatest need of attention (in the context of hard changes). In VB, dragging the galleries around brings up a transparent placeholder image showing the position possibilities and onto which you can drop the galleries to place them in the desired location. The galleries are resizable, and can dock, float, auto hide, or nest-tab, and in most locations of the screen for maximum flexibility.

Making hard changes to a UI is a potentially dangerous business, mostly for the reason highlighted by PatentGuy in post 5: making a significant hard UI change can cause a loss of familiarity to the UI and its use, and this lack of familiarity generates discomfort and therefore resistance. This is a universal phenomenon that applies to any change in general, and a reason why old dogs don’t like new tricks.

For the most part, Xara’s UI is optimally designed (certainly relative to the competition), however, there's almost always room for improvement. A better direction for this thread now would be to discuss areas in which Xara’s UI may be inefficient for a task you perform, and offer suggestions as to how it can be improved. In other words: when doing some task, what slows you down (specifically about the UI rather than a lack of a tool/feature)? How could a UI change fix this without causing it to be too tailored to that one single task and complicate or mess up the UI in general? The skill in UI design is in being efficient and avoiding redundancy. This is the objective, evidence-based approach to constructive criticism and the best way to get ‘hard’ UI changes made by Xara.

Soft changes:
The superficial look of Xara’s interface is, in principle, fine, but compared to the look of UIs in lots of other software (of any kind), it is easily arguable that it looks somewhat dated and unappealing. There are various technologies that can be taken advantage of out there to design new looks to a UI, such as Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which is a resolution independent, vector based rendering engine that takes advantage of modern graphics hardware. There are lots of interesting YouTube videos showing what it can do for interface design, and in principle could be used to skin Xara, or allow something more revolutionary. I personally would like to see some gloss on Xara which reflects its universal greatness.

So in general, it’s better to distinguish between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ UI changes, and it would be nice to see some of both in future Xara versions, in my small opinion.

[steve.ledger]

Well said Xhris.

[remi]

The Layer gallery needs a revision. Whenever I create a more complex drawing, the Layer gallery is no great help, to organise my drawing in a neatly arranged way. The same problem comes with multipage designs.

The most asked feature request from talkgraphic users to solve this, are "nested layers". They are long overdue.

Remi

[Soquili]

I can see that docking galleries working similar to VB would be a very good improvement. Please allow me to retain the ability to make them non-docking as an alternative.

Soft changes are so subjective, I cannot think of any that would actually improve the program.

A few years ago many programs adopted similar look to their interface and many people said it was more modern. Actually it was very retro and looked like applications from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

[amoore]

Generally, I prefer less eye candy rather than more. It gets in the way.

The solution would seem to be to find a way to skin Xtreme so those who have a visual sweet tooth can satisfy their cravings and we who prefer plain and simple can happily continue producing in an environment we love. :;

BTW, like Bill, I'm not a fan of docking galleries. I can think of only one instance among my apps where it's really useful. That instance comprises two specific galleries. Even in that app, docking anything else is just a waste of real estate.

[MarkMyWords]

Soft changes? I don't really care, as long as the scheme doesn't get hideous and 'strobe' the eye with too much saturated detailed.

Tabbed, docking, as mentioned earlier, I'd definitely go for nested layers and if users are to get the most out of the names gallery (or even try) - it needs a serious re-think to the interface.

[BobInce]

I don't want Xara cribbing from Adobe or Corel; I don't like the 'clever' toolbars and palettes that don't behave like normal OS widgets; I find them unproductive in those other apps. I absolutely don't want skins, gradients or textures all over the place or anything other than a standard OS-standard style. My art should be eyecatching, the UI frame around it should not.

Where I'd change things (starting with the simpler things and ending on the crazy things!):

0. Fix the outer-selection-blobs-toggling-on-drag bug! ;-) And move their sensitive area for rotation/shear to outside the blobs instead of inside, where they often clash with clicking on a control point in the corner of the selected object.

1. Move feathering to the Transparency tool Infobar. It's just weird the way it sits out there on a toolbar of its own, when it's clearly* to do with making things transparent.

* - no horrific, war-crime-level pun intended.

2. Some other features feel more out-of-the-way than they deserve, eg.: line-to-shape, clipviews and repel text should probably be on the Arrange toolbar, the web-related functions should probably be all together on a 'Web toolbar'.

3. Rationalise line properties. Currently the line width of the selected object can be set using a customisable toolbar control. Some other properties of a line - brush and stroke - can be accessed from the Freehand tool Infobar. Which is already a bit odd as they are not limited to freehand lines. Further line properties - cap, join, dash and arrows - can only be set from the Line Gallery, which is considerably more odd as no other gallery directly reflects the properties of the selected object in this way. Having to open the Line Gallery just to change the join type is an annoyance as it doesn't feel like a Gallery kind of operation. I'd do something like move line width and join type to the Path tool Infobar, and dashes and arrows/caps (which are kind of the same thing) to the Freehand tool Infobar, if that's going to be a home for 'extra, less commonly-used pathing stuff'.

4. I suppose really the Infobar controls should be as transparently customisable as the other toolbars, so there's no difference between the line-width and feathering controls and the other controls on the Infobars anyway, and if I want, let me put Transparency-combining-type on the main toolbar.

5. A quicker way to edit Grid/Duplication/Nudge distances than setting them all separately in the Options. A toolbar or pop-up with them all in one place would be handy, especially if you could set them all to the same thing with one unit entry.

6. Come to think of it the Options is a pretty weird mix of app-level, document-level and view-level settings, with it not being entirely clear which is which. This needs breaking up.

7. Better snapping UI, more inferences, with highlighting of the active inference. See Sketchup, Vegas for approaches that work well.

8. Open new documents in a separate top-level window. Classic MDI as Xtreme uses it has been dead for years.

9. However 'New View' probably should still be in the same window - but do it the modern way, with tabs.

10. OK so ideally, allow tabs to be dragged between parent windows, or dragged out to make their own top-level windows, or top-level windows dragged in to put their documents into tabs... this is something few implementations of tabs manage currently; really the window manager should be providing this functionality IMO, so I can't get too worked up about it being in Xtreme.

11. Views inside objects. Big one this but potentially very useful. If I've got a red circle inside a group inside a mould, I would like to be able to change it to a blue circle without having to take the drawing apart. Xtreme gives me a taste of this with the select-in-group Ctrl-click in the Selector tool, but I'd like to take it a bit further: select the mould and choose 'Open contents in new view'. I could then edit the straight-on, unmoulded objects on their own, without any other objects in sight, and watch in the other view as the finished moulded version updates to match. This should work for groups, clipview contents, live effects (including locked), extruded shapes, brush strokes and so on, and it should work recursively.

12. Modeless operation - generally considered preferable to modal UI, but difficult to apply to a feature-packed app like Xtreme. Essentially there'd be no more 'tools', you'd only ever use the plain selector arrow to directly manipulate the drawing. Xtreme already does this a little bit by giving more power to the Selector tool than most apps, but as an experiment (not something you could put in a commercial release app tomorrow) I'd like to put everything there.

[So instead of going to eg. the transparency tool, you'd click a purely-view-based button to 'show transparency controls on selected objects'*, which would add the texture position control points (if any positional ones, else a single control point by the object's corner), as little glass-texture-icons, which could be dragged about, or double-clicked to set their position/properties by typing numbers/manipulating widgets like currently in the Infobar. Same with all the other simple properties.

* - this would probably be on by default anyway, but you could do things like showing control points of all objects to short-cut the select-then-edit step.

The creative tools such as circles and lines you'd probably start by dragging them from a palette bar into the drawing; the two view tools push and zoom shouldn't really be necessary as they're done better by mouse controls... personally I already removed them in Xtreme.]

[steve.ledger]

I think this thread is heading down a well trodden road that Xara are well aware of.

It might be fun to see members ideas as mockups, be they 'skins' (soft) or the (Hard) UI changes.

[remi]

It might be fun to see members ideas as mockups, be they 'skins' (soft) or the (Hard) UI changes.

Why should a member do such a work? I mean, most of us have not so much free time (and willingness) to work for nothing - furthermore, it's highly doubtful that such ideas will be implemented.

Remi

[steve.ledger]

Remi, it was a light-hearted suggestion only for those who might like to spend a bit of time *playing* with some ideas and with Xtreme at the same time.
There are many who do have the time to enjoy tossing ideas around as seen by the challenges and Stop and Post threads.

Did you not read the word 'fun' ??

I did not suggest or even infer that any such ideas would be considered by Xara.

Please don't take my comments out of context or make them seem idiotic because you don't like them.