Design brainstorming

[jacobrask]

I wanted to do something about the topbar design, one thing led to another, and I ended up with some more concept sketches and suggestions.

I think that some important goals for a new design are:

• Increase learnability for somewhat-familiar users
• Reduce the number of steps for common actions for familiar and expert users
• Make it more obvious for unfamiliar (non-)users how a Critic review works

These are all lo-fi sketches, mostly showing suggested placement and hierarchy between layout elements. Some of the ideas would require substantial changes, while others could be cherry-picked to the current design.

Top bar

Review info box

Commit list

All

[jensl]

Looks very promising!

[SyuTingSong]

Good job. All my teammates feel the critic is the best code review tool, except the UI is so ugly and difficult for beginners.

[jacobrask]

Here it is with some color. Still just a draft, and missing some features, but it's time to make a live prototype to make it easier to test with content of different length, status, etc.

[jensl]

Looks awesomely!

[vimeitor]

I've been thinking for a long time that the thing that Critic truly needed was a better design. It honestly looks very very nice. Thank you for putting your time into this.

[Tigge]

So... I had a couple of hours with nothing to do and I took a quick look at this. Result is available in the https://github.com/Tigge/critic/tree/design branch (based on the quickstart branch). For now this is just a start on the navigation bar refactor work. Also, this uses Bootstrap -- which I'm not sure if Critic want to depend on.

On a related note: I'm really missing an object-relational mapper and a template system. Any thoughts on that?

[jensl]

@Tigge: There's a thread about front-end strategy on critic-dev@critic-review.org that you might want to look at: https://list.critic-review.org/pipermail/critic-dev/2014-August/000075.html (continued in September; the archive system seems a bit stupid and doesn't track threads between months, apparently.)

Object-relational mapper: No, traditionally I've preferred access the database directly. There is ongoing work to implement a better internal API though: https://critic-review.org/r/244

Template system: Nothing like that, no. I've done some work in that direction, but the front-end design that Jacob suggests would eliminate all (page) rendering from the back-end/Python side, so we'll see where actually end up. Rending HTML pages to browser clients is of course not the only possible use-case for a template system, so we might end up having one in the back-end anyway.

[zcorpan]

Stray feedback about the current UI

• It is non-obvious that you're supposed to click commits.
• There is no indication that the "reviewed" checkboxes do anything.

[rchl]

Is it still on progress or died?

[jacobrask]

There is r/333 which is awaiting review. I put up a demonstration running the frontend in r/333.

To move forward with the frontend some more features need to be added to the JSON API, such as the changes begun in r/330.

[Zitrax]

The link to the demo seem to be dead.

Has anything happened since September ?