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Originally Posted by barophobia Hello developers,
After having used the demo for just a few minutes I thought I'd post my thoughts.
1. When adding a new contact I expect my cursor to move from left to right top to bottom when I press the tab key. Currently the form goes from top to bottom left to right.
1a. In case the developers have their herts set on top to bottom left to right it would be good to highlight each field with CSS as I change the focus. That way my eyes won't be forced to look for a small blinking cursor. Maybe a 2px orange border on the field or change the background.
2. The "File As" drop down should work just like a regular drop down. That is, when I press tab it should be highlighted so that I can press up and down to change the option. When I pressed tab I expected for the drop down box to open up or be highlighted or something but instead the cursor skipped down to the E-mail box. If you had implemented 1a I would have immediately known my cursor skipped the File As drop down and went straight to the E-mail field. |
The widgets (buttons, menus, etc) in our app come from our Ajax toolkit, and don't always act like the equivalent browser widgets. Of course, we want them to act in ways users expect, which includes tabbing. One of the major client projects on our list is a keyboard model, where we could manage tab groups as well as handle keys such as Delete, arrows, etc.
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5. I really don't like the embossed brush metal theme. And the embossed Zimbra logo looks ugly too. How is this usability related? The nicer things look the more likely people are to actually using something even if it's a piece of crap (which so far Zimbra is not).
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People will never agree on what looks "nicer" (though most everyone here agrees that the current look is a big improvement over our previous one which had sharp-cornered blue boxes and was obviously designed by engineers like me). ZCS can be "skinned" by dropping the appropriate files into the "skins" directory under WebRoot. The API for the skin is to define a bunch of containers (as well as a handful of methods) for the pieces of the app to live in. We haven't yet tested a second skin.
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6. It'd be nice to be able to adjust the left pane width. The reason I say that is because I am seeing horizontal scrollbars now that the vertical scrollbars have appeared (I've changed to the Calendar view).
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We used to have a sash there, but ran into some Firefox resizing issues (which are fixed in FF1.5beta). I'll get back to it soon.
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7. Does the helps bubbles that appear over the icons on the far left really need to say "Go to Mail" "Show All Contacts" "Go to Calendar"? How about just "Mail" "Contacts" and "Calendar" (and "Help" and "Options")?
Isn't it obvious that by clicking one of those icons I will be taken to that function?
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Not to everyone. The point of the tooltip is to make the button's function absolutely clear. There's no real point, eg, to a Reply button having a tooltip that says "Reply". So we went with making even the icon-based tooltips pretty explicit about what they do. With a button that's just an icon, I see your point - the trash can tooltip could just say "Delete", and that's probably enough, same for the app icons on the left.
-Conrad