V7 UI Impressions

[darcilicious]

Thanks Fuzzy, I'll poke around, I must have something goofy on my end!

(Sorted by alpha and it showed right up, thanks!)

[nick_l]

Since I made some comments regarding the V7 interface, I though I would at least explain myself:

Sage - current recordings screen copy.png


1. Why is this the only "tab" that has a square end? All of the others have an angle, unless they butt up against the edge.
1a. While the "scanning media" icon looks good in a large size, scaled down like this it is practically undecipherable.

2. Are they recordings or items? Also the bottom "tab" is just redundant. It could easily say "Current Recordings (34 Items)" or "102 Current Recordings" (to me the item number is not helpful, the total number of recordings is much more important).

3. Constant labeling is important. If we are going to say "34 Items" then we should say "2 Recordings".

4. While all the info shown is useful, the Plot summary, I have found anyway, is by far the most useful/read. Perhaps that should be above the other items.
4a. This is just a personal prefrence, but I'd like to see a small version of the channel logo here with the channel. It may just be me, but I worked really hard on my channel logos and I never get to see them anywhere anymore (I don't use the guide).

There are a few other things. On the main or "home" screen, for instance: The convention is a group of stacking panels, one seemingly behind the next. As you arrow left, the next panel pops out from behind the current one, a nice effect, in my opinion. The problem is that once you get to the third panel and select an option, that effect goes away. They should stack back behind each other, then disappear off to the left and the panel comes in from the right. They do this if you navigate to the third panel and then use the right arrow to navigate back, but not when you actually select an menu item (eg. current recordings). Another little nit I'd like to pick is the grey vertical line that is to the right of the main panel. When you open the second panel, that line moves completely to the end of that panel. When you open the third panel, however, the line is split in weight and half stays with the second panel and half goes with the third (ON the EXTENDER, on the HD100 it just disappears all together). Personally I think that that line should be thought of as an edge or lip for each of the panels. When they are stacked there should be three lines of equal weight against each other, and as they pop open the "edge" of each panel should go with it (ie, When you open the second panel of the TV screen, for instance, there should be one line between the tv panel and the recordings panel and two lines at the end of the second, or recordings, panel. I know this is being highly particular, but the point that I'm trying to make is that whatever behavior is chosen, it should be CONSISTENT throughout.

One more example is the "tabs" that appear at the top and bottom. As you scroll through screens, the "sageTV tab" and the "info" tab at the bottom pop down and then back up as the screens change. the same cannot be said for the top "tabs". the secondary tabs, like weather, just disappear and the date tab just stays there. IMO, the behavior should be the same across the board.

I'm a huge sage fan, and I think that V7 is a great step forward. I would just like to see all of those little inconsistencies taken care of so the interface could truly shine.

Thanks for listening to me ramble.
Nick


Edit: Sorry, I thought I read the directions on adding an image directly in the post correctly, but apparently not.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by nick_l

Since I started here Ill just continue: you made another comment that, in your opinion, a developer should alway strive for the 'least amount of drill-down". My own personal opinion is that the developer should strive for clarity, consistency and usability. Having every single option available all the time is not user friendly

Not every single option. Just the main option and it's submenu instead of a photograph.

Certainly this is a legitimate area for reasonable people to disagree.

Having served over-caffienated bond traders for the last fifteen-or-so years, my bias is maximum data on the screen and the resulting minimal access time to find what I want.

I think this further supports pKasin's suggestion for a selectable UI at the macro level: Simple vs Complex.

There is also a logical fallacy that you should be able to sit anyone down in front of the tv and they should be able to just use it immediately. We aren't talking about a toaster or a toilet. There is complexity in the system.

Steve Jobs and company seem tb making a pile of money pandering to that fallacy. I read somewhere that, when they were designing the first Mac, he obsessed about how to get away with a single mouse button instead of two.

For better or for worse, eye candy is the thing. We've been clamoring for years (well, at least I have) for sage to ad some zing....

Now we're back to different people's preferences.

Me? Eye candy makes me crazy: stark, raving mad, even. "Intel Givith, Microsoft Taketh Away" doesn't just apply to MIPS; it also applies to screen real estate.

But MS offers up the "Classic" interface choice plus multiple options for lists - potentially making everybody happy.

And it's finally soaking in to my limited intellect that, via STVs and/or Plug-Ins, a similar situation may exist for Sage. If it could be rolled up and packaged in a little "Setup" submenu - and maybe shipped with the "Simple" enabled, that might enhance Sage's appeal to new users. It will certainly make 7 more approachable for me.

Also, after catering to a bunch of extremely forceful people for all those years, I've discovered that color is a big deal. The color that one person just loves nauseates another. As a result, my apps tend to be delivered in varying shades of grey unless there is a concrete reason for color. And when somebody just *has* to have color, I make it configurable by/for each user.

Except for the bright photographs, the Sage team seems to be onto this too.
In the Program Guide they use colors to good effect - distinguishing between different kinds of material, and they also allow the user to configure those colors.

you keep talking about the "flashing" pictures. There are NO flashing pictures. There are background images that change per main menu category, but they do not flash. They should transition smoothly as you go from one category to the next. After they appear on screen there should be no change in them as you drill further into a particular category

Poor choice of words on my part. I don't mean they are turning on-and-off (except for the "Home | Setup | SageTV Plugins | Installed Plugins" I described.

What I meant was that when the photograph appears on the screen - when all the meaningful data is varying shades of grey - the vividness of the photograph creates a one-time "flash" effect on the user's eyes.

Maybe I'm trying to take this too far, but it seems to me like there is also the matter of irrelevant detail. There's a significant amount of stuff going on in those photos relative to the meaningful content of the screen. Seems to me like the user's mind has to involuntarily parse all that image content every time it's shown - and therefore the photographs compete with/detract from the meaningful information on the screen.

Again, another area where personal preference might rule. But for my money, if something is that intrusive it better have a function - and I can't see any function for the photographs.

But now that I know how to get rid of them, who cares? It's Sage's problem.... they're putting up the money, who am I to tell them what to do with it?

[tchapin]

Hi Pete,

I totally agree with you.

I have found Sage v7 to be a major step backwards usability-wise. I am waiting to see what Ortus and Phoenix will have to show, but from the screen shots that I've seen so far, they don't seem to change the interaction style of the menus.

I find the menu system to feel needlessly complicated and the deeper screens to present information in a cluttered way and just use space really inefficiently.

I wrote up a post about topics like this a while ago.

[tchapin]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

By the way.. I have a question.. what does a 'professional UI designer' look like? In my opinion, it is someone who is cocky enough to tell his bosses 'this is how I say it should be done... your customer's recommendations are wrong'.

Fuzzy, I know that your question is an older one at this point, but I wanted to address it.

In basic concept, a profession UI designer is no different from a professional project manager, developer, gardener, or chef. It's someone who has training and/or experience as a user interface designer.

Now, in the web / GUI world, when people say "UI Designer", they conflate "graphic designer" and "interaction designer". Some people can play both roles, but since the tools and techniques are quite different for both, typically it's tough to combine them. A true "UI Designer" is an interaction designer.

Any good interaction designer takes the needs of the customers / users as the most important thing. Often times, this can come into conflict with the desires of the business.

I, for example, have a B.S. and M.S. in Human Factors Engineering and have been working as a professional UI designer for the past 12 years, specializing in speech recognition IVR systems. When calling a company, in most situations, people just want to talk to a human right away. But in the current business environment, that's not always possible. People demand lower prices on things and so offshoring of agents and implementation of automation have come into being.

If I were to do a major redesign of the SageTV interface, while I would take my own priorities and preferences into account, at least to give me a sense of where to start, the first thing I would do would be to survey current SageTV customers and observe both current customers and potential customers using the project in a number of different situations to find out what people like and dislike, but more importantly what they find hard to do or easy to do.

From there, there would be a lot of data analysis. Some exhaustive expert reviews of the SageTV interface would be undertaken. Interviews with the SageTV development staff would also be important.

Then some number of static / reduced functionality prototypes would be generated, discussed and reviewed. If appropriate, there could be some user-testing at this point. Then things would iterate and more detail would get introduced. Since SageTV is a complex existing product already, it may be best to segment it and approach the design tasks by segment. For example, menus, TV, music, photos, online, setup. And since the SageTV studio is so powerful, it might make sense to jump to more fully featured prototypes earlier in the process if they can be created more easily.

At each step, the data would be gone over to see if the ability for people to use the product has gotten better or worse and what areas still need to be addressed.

In the many years that I've conducted user research, I've learned that there can definitely be a disconnect between what people say they want and what they actually want. Or what they say that they found difficult and what they actually found difficult.

And of course, over the years, from both education and experience, any interaction designer will learn what sorts of things are good for an interface or bad for an interface.

Some general tenets:
- be consistent
- be clear
- present information in a straightforward manner
- use hierarchy to enforce relative importance of items

Sage DID try this. Luckily, they went back to a customer centric design philosophy - providing all the features most would want, with the most commonly used ones at the top level (note: commonly used = those used most by MOST their users.. not those used most by one of their users), while providing all functions within a couple, logically laid out layers.

It's unclear what Narflex meant when he said they hired a professional UI designer and what the design process was like. To me, it sounds like they hired a graphic designer and didn't really engage in a real user-centered design process.

The role of an interaction designer is not necessarily to be a design dictator. While it's true that that happens at some companies (most famously at Apple w/ Steve Jobs), at most places, it's run the way that I've outlined.

Redoing the SageTV interface, especially from the ground up would be a huge undertaking and probably fairly expensive.

I'd love to be involved though, even as a customer.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by tchapin

In the many years that I've conducted user research, I've learned that there can definitely be a disconnect between what people say they want and what they actually want. Or what they say that they found difficult and what they actually found difficult.

That's very true! Some of my colleagues at work do usability testing on very commonly used touch-screen-based systems. They have the test subjects do a relatively simple task on the system, and then my coworkers basically go back and look at what the users actually did. It turns out how well people like a system has very little to do with how successful they were at using it!

[valnar]

I didn't read this whole thread, but chock me up to another person who hates the new Sage7 UI design. It takes more clicks or menus to get to the same place as before now, just like Windows 7 compared to XP.

[jptheripper]

Different strokes for different folks i guess. I was really displeased with v6. I moved to v7 BECAUSE of the interface. Love it.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by nick_l

There is also a logical fallacy that you should be able to sit anyone down in front of the tv and they should be able to just use it immediately.

I agree and disagree on this. I agree in that you can't expect something this complex to be fully understood cold. That said, people should be able to "use" it immediately. What I mean is if you sit someone down in front of a SageTV (or any other similar) system, they should be able to play recordings, maybe schedule them, or watch liveTV or something from the guide, without guidance.

Originally Posted by nick_l

4a. This is just a personal prefrence, but I'd like to see a small version of the channel logo here with the channel. It may just be me, but I worked really hard on my channel logos and I never get to see them anywhere anymore (I don't use the guide).

Just to be the other side of the argument, Sage doesn't ship with channel logos, and I've never bothered setting them up because I don't really care what channel anything happens to be on

Originally Posted by PeteCress

I think this further supports pKasin's suggestion for a selectable UI at the macro level: Simple vs Complex.

Problem with that is it would likely make UI changes even slower, there'd effectively be two UI's to maintain. And depending on how it was implemented it could be even worse than that, it could be maintaining conditionals everywhere inside with everything having to check if "Complex mode" was enabled.

What I meant was that when the photograph appears on the screen - when all the meaningful data is varying shades of grey - the vividness of the photograph creates a one-time "flash" effect on the user's eyes.

I'm still not sure what you're getting at here, I don't recall seeing anything like that.

Originally Posted by valnar

I didn't read this whole thread, but chock me up to another person who hates the new Sage7 UI design. It takes more clicks or menus to get to the same place as before now, just like Windows 7 compared to XP.

It would be interesting to see if that's really the case of if people just think it is. I think the current UI actually saves me "clicks" over the V6 one.

[bialio]

Just to be the other side of the argument, Sage doesn't ship with channel logos, and I've never bothered setting them up because I don't really care what channel anything happens to be on

Since you don't watch much if any live TV this is not surprising. Logo's have a little more value if you are a channel surfer, but once a show is recorded there is very little value added by a nice transparent Channel logo, other than filling in what might be a blank spot in an OSD element.....

btl.

[mmanville]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

Having served over-caffienated bond traders for the last fifteen-or-so years, my bias is maximum data on the screen and the resulting minimal access time to find what I want.

I have some (some, not much) formal education in user access design, going all the way back to IBM CUA (which had some influence on original Windows design). It's not surprising that your bond traders wanted that, as they are candidates for what is often called "expert mode" users -- people who use an interface all the time, and are looking for comprehensiveness over comprehensibility (clarity). Though I might point out you are talking here about presentation (what's grouped on screens), not navigation (how you move from one screen to the next), which is what I think most others on this thread are commenting on.

The point is, many users are not "expert mode" candidates, they feel more comfortable, less intimidated in a more verbose & less cluttered interface -- the most typical way you see that need described here is "WAF." It is not a mistake at all to design an interface to meet the needs of both user classes. In fact, especially for a complex but immersive consumer application like SageTV, it's a mistake not to, and these alternative paradigms need to functional in the interface simultaneously, in what some people might erroneously call redundancy. Think of how windows simultaneously has menus and hotkey shortcuts.

[jaminben]

Originally Posted by tchapin

I am waiting to see what Ortus and Phoenix will have to show, but from the screen shots that I've seen so far, they don't seem to change the interaction style of the menus.

I find the menu system to feel needlessly complicated and the deeper screens to present information in a cluttered way and just use space really inefficiently.

You could always knock up your own designs of how you would prefer to see a UI act/look? I'm sure if they were good enough you could get someone to help you make it.

Cheers

Ben

[tchapin]

Hi Ben,

I've been thinking about doing that. Sadly, I've been super busy w/ work the last few months and haven't had the chance.

Todd

[spacecadet]

Originally Posted by stanger89

It would be interesting to see if that's really the case of if people just think it is. I think the current UI actually saves me "clicks" over the V6 one.

Agreed. I also think the new UI is faster to navigate (and I think it looks pretty decent, too).

[Polypro]

Originally Posted by bialio

Since you don't watch much if any live TV this is not surprising. Logo's have a little more value if you are a channel surfer, but once a show is recorded there is very little value added by a nice transparent Channel logo, other than filling in what might be a blank spot in an OSD element.....

btl.

What if you have around 100 recordings and want to find the 1 recording on the Speed Channel? With v6 I just looked for the Speed logo while clicking Page Down...now I have to read. What if the wife is just in the mood for a house show? Before she just needed to read each HGTV logo...now she has to read everything. I love v7, but just because something isn't in it, doesn't mean it is because it is better that way...no logos on the recording screen is a screw up IMO.

P

[bialio]

I'm not saying it shouldn't be there, I'm just saying I can understand how it wouldn't have much value for some people.

Besides, if you have to scroll through 100 items in a list to find something, then you have bigger issues I'm not sure if there's a way to address this in the stock UI, but I know we are looking at ways to make this a lot better in Phoenix.

btl.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I agree in that you can't expect something this complex to be fully understood cold. That said, people should be able to "use" it immediately. What I mean is if you sit someone down in front of a SageTV (or any other similar) system, they should be able to play recordings, maybe schedule them, or watch liveTV or something from the guide, without guidance.

My kids are 8 and 10. They started using Sage several years ago and had no trouble learning how to do all the things necessary to find and watch their shows. FF, Rew, skip, clear watched, archive, go to archived shows (a malore view I setup), schedule a recording of their favorite show, delete - all no problem.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

My kids are 8 and 10. They started using Sage several years ago and had no trouble learning how to do all the things necessary to find and watch their shows. FF, Rew, skip, clear watched, archive, go to archived shows (a malore view I setup), schedule a recording of their favorite show, delete - all no problem.

When my granddaughter was that age, and we'd get some electronic doo-dad that we couldn't make work - like a digital watch or bicycle speedometer - we'd just throw it to her and say "Figure it out".

No more than 30 minutes later, she'd be back to us with an explanation of how to do everything that needed tb done.

I think it's partially a way of thinking plus knowing the common possibilities/approaches.

[broderp]

Originally Posted by David G

Right, because that's exactly the reason I use SageTV. Not to record my tv shows and enjoy my media, but to spend dozens or hundreds of hours learning new tools and coming up with a new UI myself.

Sarcasm aside, yes, I agree (as I said in the first post) that the underlying product is just amazing, and perhaps I should emphasize a bit more that I'm grateful they're still supporting the HD100 and that v7 runs seamlessly on it. That's really amazing.

Independently of all this, the UI redesign is not a redesign. It's just a coat of paint and a spectacularly missed opportunity.

I'm a non-tech user who doesn't have the time to learn the stuff to modify SageTV. I see your point here.

However, v7 does run smoother for me than v6 and I can tweak it a bit, change images etc. to suit my needs.

I think the complexity of sageTV and how its presented turns many people away.

Perhaps adding a switchable mode (consumer/ power user) would give the best of both worlds. The 'consumer' version would have a basic interface with laymen terms and details, like a TIVO. The 'Power User" would be the current version we now have with all its tweaks and such.

Even so, the pluggin feature on this is a great step forward. I've never installed comskip so effortlessly!

[falltime]

I am a SageTV user since I beleive version 2 - so I am fairly familiar with the product - and I am in the camp that says THE NEW UI STINKS:

Here are a couple of examples:
What is with the menus popping all over the place. I hover over TV (for example) and I get the TV submenu - fine but first of all you have to "hover" in a very specific way and then god forbid I move the mouse in the wrong direction...Boom menu closes and another one (Music for example opens) and then I got to go all the way back and this happens over and over again INSANE! How about a simple option - open submenus ONLY with a click and back out with a right click....which brings me to

Want to go back in the menu tree ?? - of course you do, this is probably one of the most used aspects (your watching something - I want to go back to a menu) - Cant Right Click - which would be simple , you have to oh so correctly hit that very small arrow Icon on the upper right (at least there used to be a nice big SAGETV Icon to quickly get you back to Main menu) - ridiculous, GOING BACK IS A MAJOR FUNCTION WHY ARE YOU HIDING IT

Come on we are SEVEN versions in and I still cant customize the right-click - The mouse is THE MOST IMPORTANT interface on most HTPCs and the right click should be a powerful tool, instead it is relegated to "Video Menu Options" = probably the LEAST adjusted settings imaginable, why dedicate the (usually) very important right-click arrow to it???

Other Things - the UI seems to love to push everything to the left side Video lists/folders, Music, etc and then dedicate the right side to the sublist (in very small type) - this would be great EXCEPT there isnt enough screen Real Estate for the list on the left and so Sage ends up giving me file and folder names that are only partials and then you get ..... SO STUPID - let me have the option to have the files and folders take up the entire screen and the CLICK for a submenu....I am doing this on a TV, I want the Fonts big and simple and clean.

Last Example - Browse Photos - the whole interface is unusable - 1st it makes these huge tiles but puts the folder names in a tiny little corner (of course cutting off 90% of the folder name and giving me the Win 3.1 version of .....) then it pops the thumbnails out at you as the mouse hovers over each folder or picture...sounds great - but there is nowhere to "rest" the mouse and so the whole UI just starts popping thumbnails at you so fast you cant figure out what the hell is going on. Where is the option to kill the popping thumbnails?? (and frankly since I can make the thumbnails fairly big why do they even need to pop at all)

So there you go, this is my review of the new UI - it stinks.

I love Sage, am impressed with the speed of version 7 but it needs alot of work if it is to be taken seriously.