• Usability issues

  last modified May 3 by csw14

This is a scratch area for comments on the user interface / usability of p4a calendar

Comments on p4a calendar before the Boston sprint started

Prior to the Boston sprint in May 08, the WebLion team installed p4a calendar and recorded a number of issues (reprised in italics below; for a full description of the issues at the time they were recorded, see the WebLion wiki)

Issues that still appear to be outstanding

  • If you create new event content types... things seem to start to go a bit haywire. Plone's Event content type does not contain all the fields I need for my events, so I need to subclass it. I can change the criteria for the relevant smartfolder so that my new event content types types display there, but currently, they don't show up in the calendar. They need to!
  • The calendar view...gets rid of the Title of the Smart Folder to which you apply the calendar view. When you toggle the calendar on for a smartfolder, the title of the smartfolder disappears. We should retain the title of the smartfolder as the title of the calendar, because on a site with more than one calendar, the title will be crucial in telling us where we are (movies or concerts? biology lectures or chemistry lectures?) It would also be useful to have the description and rich text field contents show up as well.
  • The list view template doesn't show the times of the events by default. Having at least the start time (and ideally the end time too) would be useful for many kinds of events.
  • If an event starts on one day and ends on the next... the order in which it appears [on the second day] is incorrect. I added an event that started at 5pm on May 17 and ended at 8am on May 18. On the Month view, it was correctly listed on May 18 before an event that started at 7.30 am on May 18. However, on the week view and day view, it was listed as starting at 5pm on May 18.

New comments on the version produced during the Boston sprint

Toggling calendar views on and off for a particular smartfolder

  • Adding the toggle to the same green bar as "add new", "actions" etc means it is more obvious than when it was hidden in the "actions" menu. However, the label "subtypes" is not very understandable. Any way it can be labeled differently? e.g. "Enable calendar views" or something? (Is "calendar" the only thing that will ever be in here, or is this something that will be extended?)

Week view

  • I scheduled two events at overlapping times. The blocks show up alongside each other but words in th the event titles are truncated, the titles themselves are truncated, and the letters collide with the outlines of the enclosing box. Would it be better to have events listed in the same way as the month view, i.e. listed in order of start time, rather in the same way as day view. (Or could the site manager choose between these 2 options? This kind of toggle also could be a useful option for the day view, for calendars which have tens or hundreds of events per day)
  • Can we add vertical lines to delineate the difference between days on the week view? For events late in the day, it can be hard to tell which day they fall under.

  • The headers do not collapse intuitively when shrinking the week-view window When you click on the week tab the header displays both day of the week and date. If you resize the window right to left (smaller), the dates and resize the window width left to right, the dates do not disappear all at once, leaving some as orphans in the headers. This is cluttered and perhaps confusing

  • The green content menus disappear in week view, and indeed every other view except month view.

Year view

Please!

The 'Past' option shouldn't be there at all

I can't think of any other mainstream calendar software that offers Past alongside Day, Week, Month, Year, List. Suggest we get rid of it.

  • If you apply the calendar view to a smartfolder that doesn't contain a "past" subfolder (most of the events smart folders on my site), the "past" option fails to disappear from the set of tabs, so clicking the tab yields a very unhelpful "page not found" message.

I suspect that Past is being thrown in for good measure; Plone administrators and users may be accustomed to the collection/aggregator effect that's offered at the /events URL of most Plone sites

  • in that context, the value of Past is:
    • presentation of events that might otherwise be difficult to reach from the default view
    • Plone site managers who have found their site without current/upcoming events will probably know that 'How do I click through to past events?' feeling.
  • in a calendar context, however, everyone understands that there's a hidden past and a future
    • and there are clear pointers, in both directions (we have these already, albeit not leaping out at us)
    • Ploneheads may like Past in the /events listings but in Plone4ArtistsCalendar views, such buttons become clutter.

Past is not a view:

  • it's a filter
    • no, it's a collection! Speak Plone!(you shout) but end users without foreknowledge of Plone and aggregation criteria don't think in such terms
  • I digress (!) but let's remind ourselves that the calendar UI should:
    • primarily serve the needs and expectations of end users, with suitaby plain language
    • not be constrained or muddied by the inner workings/logic of Plone ;)
  • if Past belongs anywhere, it belongs in the context of filters and/or searches. +1

Order of views is not intuitive

Searches, filters, date range selectors

Option to visually distinguish events depending on event type and keyword

To help the site manager write CSS that could use colors or other things to help distinguish different types of events from one another:

  • Can we assign a class to events that would reflect the content type (standard plone event, event content type A that subclasses plone event, event content type B that subclasses plone event.... e.g. Movies, Concerts, Debates, Parties...).
  • Can we also classes to events that would reflect the keywords assigned to it? (e.g. For a Movie event type, keywords might be thriller, drama, foreign language etc)

Display default

  • Can I, the site manager, select the default view that someone goes to when they view a page. For instance, can I set things up so that an anonymous viewer sees a week or day view by default rather than a month view? Didn't immediately spot how to do this ... seems to be in the "display menu"?
    • Display menu: default is Month. Can we add week and day too? (Note I didn't understand "Event list" and "Event archive" options.
    • http://www.plone4artists.org/products/plone4artistscalendar/issues/74 outlines a bug with the other menu options (Event list, Event archive). Clicking "Events archive" gave me a "page not found" error, because the smart folder I applied the calendar to had no such contained smartfolder

    Controls to move calendar view forwards / backwards a month or a week or a day

    • These are very subtle -- I didn't immediately spot them. Can they be moved closer to the words spelling out the time period? (e.g. "May 08" on the month view). It's good that they have an id that can be used to change the styling to make them more prominent. What is this wee symbol -- will it display properly in old browsers? Would an image (background image in css?) be better?
      • +1

    Past/future and other controls and switches should advertise themselves shamelessly

    • In month view, the week numbers in the left-hand column are click-able and switch to week view.
      • have the entire 'cell' (not just the number) clickable, easier to target, and shout it out: have a change to the shading of the cell's colour as the cursor rolls over
    • Indicate by the shading of the tabs which view we are currently on (week, month or whatever)
      • Currently, the "week", "month" etc tabs are not shaded even when we are on the item. Use shading to appear to make the current tab "be at the front"

    Issues that appear to have been solved

    • The calendar view template only seems to list 2 events within a box for a day: I added 5 events in a day: they all showed, in order of start date. When I added another, I got a "more..." link (much more understandable than the previous "+")
    • The calendar view template truncates the titles of events: titles now wrap nicely in the month view (but see above for comments on week view)
    • A toggle to make the view jump forwards or backwards a month (or a week, or a day) at a time. I now see little arrows
    • Day view appears to be broken. http://www.plone4artists.org/products/plone4artistscalendar/issues/66