Gallery2:Usability Issues

Usability Home

Theme Usability Guide

1. Photo-Page
2. Visual Distinction between albums and items
3. Visual distinction between view modes

Inspections

1. Item Actions
2. Site administration

Draft for Information Architecture -Site Admin-

IA-suggestion for Site administration

Summary: Working on some sections on the site admin I realized that it needs some more work. The major problems on site admin seem to be:

• findability of settings
• interface design

There are also some special requirements for the gallery site admin area:

• configuration dialogs in a web environment
• need for scalabilty because of plugins

Findability of settings

For the moment settings in the site admin can be reached over the long list of plugins in the menu. Every plugin is represented as a link on the list, which has several sections. I worked with the typical release version of gallery2. That means that not all plugins are installed. The problem of findability arises because of the many items in the list which are only poor categorized. Also some settings are hidden in the settings for a plugin. For example: someone searches for the setting to change the informations that are shown in the image block. Not knowing that image block is a plugin and that it has the name image block, he could be easily lost and could have to click on a lot of links before he gets to the right settings area.

• For a better findability it would be usefull to recategorize the site admin. Don't take the attribute "is plugin" as a reason to put something on the first level of categorization. Fewer main categories would help the user to localize a special setting.

Interface design

The interface design should support the user. At the moment every plugin has one page with one or more sections on the right. When there are many sections the user eventually has to scroll down very long. Searching for a special configuration setting is hard because the sections look very similar and are difficult do distinguish.

Web environment

For restructuring and rearranging of site admin and the interface elements on the pages, it has to be considered that its a configuration dialog in a web environment. Dialog like wizzards, which are normally quite common in configuration dialogs don't work so good in that case. New interaction models have to be developed. ajax-implementation could be an alternative.

Scalability

The interface design must be highly scalable because plugins can be easily installed or removed. The integration of the settings of these plugins must be easy.

Drafts

draft 1

draft 1

draft 1

draft 1

features:

• four main categories: Display, System, Users & Groups, Extras
• subsections are obvious on the first glance
• draft 1 and 2: ajax-behaviour (when clicked on details, area below drops out)
• simplify dialogs
• include further information tooltips for settings that need explanation

Permissions

moved to Permissions

Issues

• Display of albums (Title, Owner,.. have to be displayed in same line)
• "no thumbnail" should be link to set thumbnail
• set thumbnail at level of album (strange workflow to navigate to picture and then "highlight"; should instead be possible to see an overview of the items in an album and pic one to set as thumbnail)
• after successful album creation or item upload there must be autodirection into that album

See also:

Gallery2:Season_of_Usability_2008