Hello everyone! I am Nitin Singhal, a Product Designer, and an active contributor in Open Source Communities currently associated with CircuitVerse as a GSoC'20 Mentor. @pombredanne introduced me to Scancode-Workbench and I was hoping I could help to enhance the overall usability of this platform. I've been going through the Documentation and the application to understand Scancode and will start very soon by discussing the different aspects of the platform we could improve.
One more thing, I noticed that the current UI offered by the application is very minimalistic, so should it be given a certain colour them or should be kept as it is now. Comments?
cc: @majurg
The wiki opens from two different places - "Wiki" link and Learn More, that should be corrected.
I was also thinking of a Step-By-Step Guide or Product Tour of the features and application for the first time installers. [Something like https://introjs.com/], so new users could know:
- How to start using the application
- What are all the features and views that users can utilize
- Where are all the options located
Views?
I am opening an issue for the same, if anyone is willing to work on it, I would be very happy to discuss on what all to include in the guide, with them.
Also on the welcome screen: The "How to run a scan with ScanCode Toolkit" button redirects to https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/wiki/How-To:-Run-a-scan, which basically mentions 3 different links of Documentation. Rather the button should directly link to https://scancode-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/how_to_run_a_scan.html, as the button says, if the Getting Started with ScanCode Toolkit Documentation is necessary to show, we can have a separate button for that.
Users expect getting shown, what they click on, without any confusions or friction.
Views?
Yes, definitely. Since the application is already made, I am actually following the approach of performing usability testings. So, the above changes and a few of those that I'll be suggesting next might sound like minor fixes to you, but they are indeed needed to enhance the usability.
I'll be suggesting structural changes once we are done with the small independent issues.
Oh ok, and do we have any kind of system that logs in every action that the users take? This can actually contribute to organize the layout of the application, know what all features (maybe columns in this case) are often used. This way we can arrange items on the application accordingly (like hiding less commonly used option and making the common ones easily available) to reduce the overall cognitive effect for the users. Because currently all the features are laid down for the users that may contribute to the friction in users' journey.
Application Telemetry/Analytics can really help us understand how the application is actually being used.
Basically, this can be done by using the Application Insights SDK by setting up for a free-tier of Azure.
There is a significant performance hit when generating the filters on a large scan file. Having them run automatically might significantly degrade the user experience if all you want to do is look at results and dont plan on using filters.
That being said, the filter value generation can most certainly be improved in multiple ways, including running in the background etc. So there is a lot of room for improvement.
I understand work on the documentation is required. I am just suggesting rather than having different buttons for Activate Filters and Clear Filters, we can have something like:
- The Activate Filters when clicked, changes the button text to Clear Filters, or
- There is a toggle button to activate/clear the filters.
Toggles are the best in this case for interaction since the choice is binary [whether to have filters or not]
nexB/scancode-workbench#509
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