Move / Create Data Entry UI messed up

[ronnyb]

Love these two new features a lot, but the contents of both of these input dialogs are not centered; it makes the app feel cheap...

 

[MikeTO]

32 minutes ago, ronnyb said:

Love these two new features a lot, but the contents of both of these input dialogs are not centered; it makes the app feel cheap...

I believe the dialogs were designed to fit all languages and all shapes so English Polygon might be one of the emptier dialogs.

Create shape - some of the complex shapes have two columns of controls. The latter example (rounded rect callout) looks pretty good even in English.

  

Move / Duplicate

This dialog's minimum width is constrained by the width of the three buttons. The controls above are positioned as they are so that the longest label (Number of Copies) will fit to the left of the controls in the longest language while the label Previous Settings has to fit to the right of the checkbox although compressed text is used for a couple of languages. I agree that there are other ways this could have been laid out.

There is a tiny layout issue with the Move/Duplicate dialog that I didn't notice until now. 🙂 The Reset and Cancel buttons are closer than the Cancel and OK buttons. Reset and Cancel should be spaced equal or greater than Cancel and OK. I assume this was just an oversight.

[debraspicher]

They need to hire the most crotchety UI/UX nerd they can find but I think we can all agree it could look a helluva lot worse. There just needs to be more polish and consistency.

I hadn't thought of multilingual considerations, so @MikeTO has a point there. It probably doesn't help that the program goes for TI style decimal precision so the input fields are required to be rather large. I am sure there are other considerations.

[ronnyb]

@debraspicher It’s not about being “crotchety” 🙄 that’s a simplistic and naive characterization. It’s about competing with the big boys and offering a well designed and laid out UI for DESIGN software… 

@MikeTO the width of the panels as defined by the 3 buttons is fine. It’s just about centering the upper content of the panel. Yes, for each language…. 

The one-size-fits-all approach will always yield lowest common denominator results…..

[Bryan Rieger]

12 hours ago, debraspicher said:

They need to hire the most crotchety UI/UX nerd they can find but I think we can all agree it could look a helluva lot worse. There just needs to be more polish and consistency.

One of the big challenges Serif has with their UI/UX is that they chose to roll their own UI framework (on macOS it's libcocoaui.framework) and components, rather than use the standard platform frameworks and components (or an established cross-platform UI framework such as Qt). As a result, not only do they not get to benefit from enhancements and additions made to the underlying platforms by the OEMs, but they are now also tasked with the Sisyphean task of maintaining and updating their own framework and components in a never-ending attempt to keep up with basic hygiene, UI/UX guidelines, best practices, etc across all of the platforms they support.

While there's nothing wrong with creating and maintaining a whole new UI framework and component set, it does beg the question of whether the required resources for this endeavour wouldn't be better utilized focusing on your actual products. I do get the attraction of using an abstraction layer across platforms, but the danger in this is that you end up with a user experience that doesn't feel quite right anywhere (just try customizing the app toolbar on macOS, dragging items around is PAINFUL compared to almost every other macOS app[1]). 

Edit
[1] It appears the app toolbar received some attention in 2.2 as it's not nearly as painful to use as it was. Still a few quirks, but the customize feature generally works much more like a standard macOS app toolbar now. 🙏

I wish Serif would take the opportunity with their milestone releases such as 2.2 to not only list the new features they've added, but to also share what bugs they've addressed (especially the long standing ones) as not everyone reads the beta notes. It may seem like a minor thing, and you may feel there are far too many to list, but quite honestly fixing the app minimize behaviour along with the customize app toolbar feature feature on macOS (both fixes shipped in v2.2) are far more important to me than any of the new 2.2 features. It would also clearly communicate how Serif is working hard to both fix bugs (including long standing ones) and release new features.

Edited September 20, 2023 by Bryan Rieger
More info based on v2.2 and a wish.

[Pšenda]

9 hours ago, debraspicher said:

There just needs to be more polish and consistency.

Personally, the "centering" of the content even with regard to the need for different languages does not irritate me at all - it is a completely standard procedure.
Far worse is the utter inconsistency and confusion in the design of the dialogue fx.

Wrong/inconsistency dialog for Outline vs other/consistency dialog:

Why is Colour setings item highlighted? (on another monitor it is more noticeable), and why is indented?

[ronnyb]

38 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:

it does beg the question of whether the required resources for this endeavor wouldn't be better utilized focusing on your actual products. I do get the attraction of using an abstraction layer across platforms, but the danger in this is that you end up with a user experience that doesn't feel quite right anywhere

That’s the crux of the matter!

[debraspicher]

3 hours ago, ronnyb said:

It’s not about being “crotchety” 🙄 that’s a simplistic and naive characterization. It’s about competing with the big boys and offering a well designed and laid out UI for DESIGN software… 

I have to disagree. I would hope that they're willing to allow the apple cart to be shaken frequently to push towards increasingly higher standards. If everyone is a soup of agreeableness, then those standards slip and we end up with "just good enough". It's good enough (at that moment), but long term things like this wear.

In fact, it seems you do agree with me, since you've just called my wording "simplistic and naive". Seems pretty dogged to me, which I'm not faulting in the least here.

[ronnyb]

4 hours ago, debraspicher said:

I have to disagree. I would hope that they're willing to allow the apple cart to be shaken frequently to push towards increasingly higher standards. If everyone is a soup of agreeableness, then those standards slip and we end up with "just good enough". It's good enough (at that moment), but long term things like this wear.

In fact, it seems you do agree with me, since you've just called my wording "simplistic and naive". Seems pretty dogged to me, which I'm not faulting in the least here.

I have to disagree with your disagreement about my disagreement  Although it seems we both agree the UI needs polish...

Crotchety is not what makes a good UI/UX designer. One of the things good designers do is pay attention to details...

[lepr]

On 9/20/2023 at 3:34 AM, debraspicher said:

crotchety

I believe you meant pernickety/persnickety