A couple of usability suggestions

[bthuddo]

Hello,
my name is Ben Hudson. I've been using Bookends & Mellel everyday for the last six months for my PhD work. I'm finding it to be an excellent tool. Thanks so much for all the work that has gone into.

I have come from a software usability testing and interface design background, and I would like to offer some observations and suggestions that I feel mighty help to make Bookends an even better product.

I might spread these out over a bunch of posts. First up concerns the toolbar and the top of the window:

1. I notice that I am able to drag my Bookends window vertically beyond the boundary of the screen and 'up-under' the Mac OS menu bar. This feels like stage behaviour, that windows in other apps don't normally do. If I go too far with this, it is very difficult to 'retrieve' it without using 'Reset Window Position' in the Window menu. I would question the need for both of these features (ie the ability to drag the window up, and the reset window position menu item). To me, they add complexity and make the app feel a tiny bit 'not quite native' as it behaves differently to what I expect from my experience with other apps.

2. The toolbar in Bookends behaves a bit differently to the standard Mac OS toolbar system. It looks a bit different, and I can't move toolbar items around, or customise it at all.

3. The tab bar in Bookends appears above the toolbar, not below it, as in every other Mac OS app. Again, this is strange and unexpected behaviour that I feel detracts more than it might add as so much of usability - especially on the Mac with such well established interface design conventions - starts with user intuitions based on prior experience.

cheers
Ben

[Jon]

Thank you for the feedback.

1. We have code to prevent that, but there are situations where it doesn't work. I'll have another look.

2. Because of the IDE we use we can't use the native OS toolbar and have created our own, which is functionally almost identical, although can't be customized.

3. That's a good idea, I'll play around with that for the next update.

Jon
Sonny Software

[bthuddo]

Thanks for the response. Which IDE do you use? (and why?)

[Jon]

Xojo. For lots of reasons, one being that it accelerates the pace of development.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

Issues 1 and 3 have been resolved in the next update.

Jon
Sonny Software

[bthuddo]

Great! Thanks for being so responsive. That's great to see.

[bthuddo]

I have a few more thoughts. This time concerning the (left hand) side-bar.

I find a couple of things about the side bar behave slightly unexpectedly. 'Groups' mode behaves a little differently to 'Terms' mode, and I can't really see why. Here's my suggestions:

1. The word 'Groups' in the sidebar header is slightly larger than when it's showing a list of Terms, say 'Author'.
2. Searching is inconsistent. When in group mode, clicking on the heading brings up a box where you can search. In Terms mode, the search box is always there. Why this difference?
3. I suggest implementing the sidebar more like in Safari. The side bar could have two tabs at the top, the left hand one could be for groups (a little folder icon), the right hand one (a little list icon) could give a drop down list allowing you to choose the term you'd like to list by, with favourite, or recent terms at the top. You could probably then do away with the 'Term Lists' item in the Window menu altogether. (I notice Mellel has recently implemented a Tab based sidebar. This seems to be becoming conventional).
4. Searching could then be accessed by scrolling up a little way in the side bar (see the Safari sidebar for example). This seems to be a convention these days as well, and what I expect. It would be neatly out of the way until needed.
5. When viewing Groups, I find the '⌘' column wastes space and crops my titles in a way that looks odd. Is this column really necessary? Could the count badges for groups be placed in this column? The item counts for the Term lists could be displayed in the same way for consistency.
6. I think the language of 'Terms' is a bit obscure. What about 'Lists', 'List by:', 'Search Lists' etc... ?
7. I think it would be good to have a little button in the bottom bar (on the left hand side of the main, central panel) to show/hide the side bar (as in Mellel and many other apps).
8. I think the sync button should be moved from the bottom of the sidebar to the tool bar, as it relates conceptually not just to Groups, but to the whole library. Perhaps this could mean the bottom bar could be removed all together for the sidebar.

What do you reckon?
cheers
Ben

[Jon]

Thanks again for the feedback. I'll add these to the suggestions list. There are a few things I'll comment on now.

2. It's always there for Term Lists because you can have thousands of terms I expect people to use it frequently. There are many fewer groups and I expect searching to be done rarely. But I take your point.

3. We kept a separate Term List window because it has useful capabilities the embedded list doesn't. For example, you can insert terms into one or more references from the window.

5. The ⌘ column is special -- if the row is a static group, you can click in it and enter a number from 1-9. Then doing a Command-# will automatically add the selected references to the corresponding group. This is a handy shortcut.

6. Terms denotes "Term Lists", which is what these lists are formally called. So the word Term is used because it's more descriptive than List.

Jon
Sonny Software

[thecritic]

3. The tab bar in Bookends appears above the toolbar, not below it, as in every other Mac OS app. Again, this is strange and unexpected behaviour that I feel detracts more than it might add as so much of usability - especially on the Mac with such well established interface design conventions - starts with user intuitions based on prior experience.

Indeed. And there are 2 toolbars, in effect, aren't there? There's the toolbar at the top of the library window, and the one that appears when one double-clicks a reference to view its pdf attachment. While I know that pdf attachments have always been viewed at the bottom, I have to say that I find it strange to see tabs (which don't really look like taps in other Mac apps) at the bottom of the library window. The problem with this is that to view (and annotate) pdfs, it seems that one has to slide the divider upward to make room (unless one enters full-screen mode?), with the result that the library view is minimized. In the now-defunct Sente, by comparison, double-clicking a reference opened a pdf tab just below the toolbar at the top of the library window, right next to the library display. Would this be possible in Bookends as well?

[Dellu]

These are great suggestions.
how about putting some icons of the Terms in the main toolbar, just like Papers 3?

Papers and Bookends are similar in many aspects. The developers of Papers seem to take a lot of lessons from Bookends, and make some interesting improvements.



- Sources = Journals
- Library = groups


One impressive change in Papers 3 is done on the Search feature. First, the search doesn't open a separate window for the browser. It is just another view in the same main window. Furthermore, the way the search is integrated in Papers 3 is very smart. Searching the web searches the local library at the same time. BE also does that. But for BE, it is only to protect duplicates (if I understood it correctly). In Papers 3, you can directly open and start to read it when you find a paper is already in your library. You don't have to do a separate search to the local library again. Not only it is able to search both the local library and the web, it is also able to search across many websites at the same time like DevonAgent. That is brilliant.



I personally don't much worry about interface. I already like BE in its current form. I also don't think Paper 3 is better than BE. Indeed, BE is much complete reference manager. But, I like how the Search feature is implemented in Papers.

[DarrenIngram]

I will chime in and just add that if/when you change anything, please bear in mind some of us have poor eyesight/visual handicaps and not all cutesy icons and colour schemes as deployed by some developers in the name of change are necessarily helpful for us On that level, I am glad that you've resisted the chance to go wild thus far. If I look at the "smilies" to the right of this compose window, at the time of writing, most of them are unreadable to me without zooming in - even on my 34-inch monitor that is not at maximum resolution. I can see the teeth of the smile, for example, but the differences in some of the faces is lost without a lot of unnecessary work. I am lucky that I don't need to use a screen reader for every operation, so cannot comment on Bookends from that perspective, but experience suggests that many developers also skimp on that support too when they "pretty up" things.

Bookends-wide change abilities for font weights and fonts (as an application level, rather than output control to documents) would be nice if it could, one time, be supported. For some, even the slight change of a font or a nudge up of the size means the difference between discomfort and comfort or wearing out the mouse button for zooming.

However, if it means going towards the UI abomination that is Word as part of Office 2016, please don't.

The suggestions regarding search are, if possible, interesting.

[bthuddo]

Hey guys,
I hope you're finding this discussion useful. I really appreciate all your work on Bookends. I think it's a great app and I'd love to see it keep improving. I hope the comments are received in that spirit.

Here's a few thoughts regarding the main central section of the window where the table or list of references appears.
I usually view my references in the table view. With the table headers there are a few things I notice (I realise a few of these are a bit pedantic),

1) The Header text is not aligned vertically in the cell. This looks slightly odd to me.
2) The Authors header on the far left has less space on the left than the other headers.
3) The column 'Authors' also contains the hits column and the attachments column. It would be better, I think if these columns had their own headers, so you could order a table by the presence of attachments or not, and perhaps the header for the Hits column could be a check box that functions as a select/deselect all button.
4) I'd love to be able to rearrange columns by dragging them around by their headers. This is pretty standard behaviour for tables on MacOS I think (I'm thinking spreadsheets, iTunes, etc. This would be a big improvement).
5) When you right click a column header, at the moment you get a contextual menu with a single item in it (that's odd) which then opens another menu which allows you to swap that column for another. It would be better if right clicking any header gave you a list of all the possible columns and you could turn them on or off from there. (then rearrange by drag and drop). This would mean the (rather clunky) 'Fields to display' section in Preferences could be removed too. c.f. iTunes for an example of how this might work.
6) When the top row of the table is one with a white background, there is nothing to differentiate the table header from the row. I suggest a thin line under the table headers would be a nice aesthetic touch. (again, c.f. iTunes to see what I mean).

thoughts?

[Jon]

1. I don't know what you mean.
2. The other columns are offset to the right a few pixels to improve readability (so the cells don't run into one another). The first column is not, of course.
5. The clunky section in preferences let's you add or remove columns, not just swap them. I can think of ways this could be done by right clicking in the reference header, too, but that would be not at all obvious to non-pro users.

Jon
Sonny Software