As you may remember from my last post, I was talking about faceted browsing panels for Dolphin. As Peter wrote a few days ago, we had some discussions, and from that on I started working on a simple file manager application, in which I wanted to test the faceted panel that was included in the last screenshot, or actually a better version of that panel.
The application is far from finished, but now I need some opinions on three different UIs that I’m trying for the faceted browsing; so, here is the screenshot.
Different panels
It is a collage of the UIs, please forgive any white space left in the corners…
Anyway, the leftmost is quite a standard faceted browsing system: you have three (for now, maybe more later) list views, all equal to each other, in which you can select only one value (the first two boxes) or more than one (the last one). I have put the numbers only in those facets for which I thought it made sense, in particular when multi-selection is permitted.
The central panel has been suggested by Sebastian Trüg during that discussion, I don’t know why my window theme gives the same style both to the tool buttons and to the group box title, anyway the idea is to substitute the single selection lists with a button group.
The rightmost panel tries to use the most intuitive widgets for each facet, so there are buttons for the document type, a calendar widget for the date section, and a tag cloud for selecting tags (its code has been adapted from the Semnotes program by Laura Dragan). The idea of making it started during some discussions at the Nepomuk Sprint, and it tries to be more intuitive than the other two, but of course it loses the UI similarity between the different facets.
So, in the end: what do you think? What would you find more usable/intuitive/useful/whatever? I won’t tell you what I like the most, I’d prefer some fresh opinions on it… You can find all the three panels in the project repository (I have a branch for each of them), but their actions are not connected to anything, so you cannot actually browse any file 🙂
I want to decide the definitive one, before finishing its implementation.
Syvo3 
The right panel is my favourite and appear to be the best one
I also prefer the right panel.
1. Date:
The right panel allows the most detailed choice for the date range, which may be advantageous over a fixed set of choices. Also, everyone knows how to use a calendar. What could be improved is the selection bar atop the calendar. Clearly, it is necessary, but it may not be clear immediately what it does.
2. File type choice:
I like that you ask for more general kinds (i.e. “images,” not “png”s), but I find the button list hideous. Here, I would actually prefer the list widget from the left panel. In any case, it would be great if multiple selections were possible.
3. Tag chooser:
I really like the right version. If you go for a different widget, please emulate the proportions by introducing optional ranking according to the number of files tagged with each tag.
The only problem I could see with the right tag chooser is if there are too many tags. What happens if you have hundreds of tags? This clearly needs to be tested.
Right is right (and sexier)! Go right and you can’t go wrong. 🙂
I like the tag chooser in the right hand panel however I feel that the middle panel is functionally different (selecting multiple tags will narrow down the search to objects containing both tags right).
Maybe a new type of chooser that allows the selections to be toggled would be in order (with a clear button).
The what section could potentually have quite a few items in it and might also be better serviced by a chooser like the tag chooser.
maybe in addition to the clear button a text entry that displays what is selected and allows for entry by keyboard and filtering the list of options.
That leaves the when entry. I need to think that over – possibly the calender is to busy by default. My thoughts are that the search should recall recently used dates. Allow for the easy setting of most commonly used date searches and allow for the possibility of adding date by keyboard. Purhaps a calender should be accessible but not shown by default.
I have thought a bit further on the when and I think that a good way to represent this would be a single logarythmic slider with two points that could be manipulated… By logarythmic I mean that towards the end (right) of the scale the basic unit of measure should be day as you head towards the beginning (left) of the scale the time divisions should get progressively coarser becoming weeks,months,years and perhaps even decades. The points one week ago, one month ago and one year ago should be marked week,month & year. I don’t think there should be any finer grain markings.
This should be suplimented by a pair of entries that show the exact to and from dates that can be modified by keyboard. Purhaps today should be displayed instead of the current date (maybe others as well).
Does this make sense or would it be of more use to do a mockup
Since I proposed it I am obviously a fan of the middle version. However, for the date selection I would prefer less defaults (maybe even based on previous searches although I am really not sure if that would be convenient. Would have to be tested) and a \other\ button which would bring up the calendar.
I also like the logarithmic slider idea. But I think I would need a mockup to discuss it further.
As for the tags: A tag cloud would make sense if the sizes of the tags were relative to their frequency in the results and not their overall frequency.
I also think that you could probably drop the \When\ and \What\ labels all together and just add a little space between the groups (which would then not use groub boces anymore) -> less clutter.
I think the tag-cloud is definitely the way to go for ‘what else’. For ‘when’, though, I think it’s valuable to have nice and clear, easily understandable labels ‘Anytime’, ‘Today’, ‘Last Week’ and such. A calendar can be unweildy especially in a filemanager when your focus should be on the files and the dockwidgets should ‘just work’ without requiring much brain focus. Hmmm, actually might it make sense to allow toggling/tabbing between the two? So that by default it shows a ‘list’ UI like the other two, but if the user is dissatisfied/wants more there is a ‘advanced’ tab/button that would replace the list with the calendar.
Just 2 cents 🙂
i’d like to see the right panel with the filetype chooser from the left one. 🙂
I like the right panel the most. However all the colours on the calendar are distracting me. And please don’t use underline in fonts for the tags. Underlines are bad for readibility and they clutter a lot.
I am also inclined towards the one on the right, but wanted to note that it is very wide, so if you use a small dolphin window the one on the right will “steal” a lot of space.
The ones in the middle and in the left could be made very thin, and still be usable, so that is definitely an advantage for them.
Just a side note: the tags shown will be only those referred by the files shown in the main view; I don’t have a clear idea on what to put in there at the beginning, but when the user will narrow the main list, then the tag list will narrow, too.
Right UI is ok, but I think that the panels should be draggable and resizable so anyone can set it up to his/her preference.
I shall attempt a mockup when I get home from work
I’d be happy if there were no listboxes at all so here are my ideas…
For the When:
a pimped middle Version would be my favorite – make the \where\ distinct (bold?) from the actual enties and the whole part scrollwheel aware so i can scroll down to go back in time (day, week, month, year, decade with the respectiv \last\ counterpart as it is ) and mimic a slotmachine style roll ( like the plasma add widget category chooser but horizontally ) Scrolling for me is much convenient to use as one doesn’t have to point and click at a exact position but the items come to the \selected\ position no matter where the mouse is in the panel while scrolling so its somethig for the lazy 😉
the calender view should be there as a advanced view (no good idea yet how to switch ) but its too specialized & technical for the default \there was this pdf i downloaded last month or so\ query and needs more interaction to specify the (last)day,week,.. presets
For the \What\ its basically the same, scrolling to select a type, don’t think a multiple section would make sense as there is already a \all\ and limiting to filetypes is too technical again for this kind of \quickfind\ dialog and grouping should be the job of the presentation like dolphin already offers
The Tag Cloud:
Of course i has to be a cloud!
i would like to see a cloud as in wordle.net just in case anybody hasn’t seen it – try it! with alphabetic sorting on so the whole thing is layouted with 0..A..Z from left to right, maybe the opacity of colors should reflect their selected state, but p l e a s e offer a sexy tagcloud!
so thats all for now, keep up your good work!
Mix #2 with #3. From #3 take tag section, the rest from #2. I think it would be usable GUI then.
You should definitly sent this link to https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability for profesional review.
The calendar widget while giving a little more flexibility clutters the UI with a “in your face” giant widget full of text and numbers and complicates the most easy selections like “This week” “This month”. So I’d go for the central mock-up maybe using the tag cloud widget
What about…
@Santi: it is an interesting idea, and it reminds me of some old Swing editor for Eclipse; it may become useful when we will have more facets, but with only three I think we can show them at the same time.
I like the right one the most. The calendar for its ability to select more than predefined ranges (which I see are available on the top) and the file type selector because it’s less distracting in a panel, with its gray background. I also like the tag cloud but I think there should be a way to select several tags, and the widget on the middle proposal may be more appropriate.
That said, I think the mockup by Santi is really cool. I especially like the “custom date” option for the date and the search box for tags and file types.
The third column stands out straight away as the most visually easy to understand, though the ‘What?’ section isn’t so nice. I’d have thought some form of tick boxes would be better here, allowing multiple selections.
About the document type selection: I thought about it as a single selection; does multiple selection really be useful? Remember that (probably) the document types will be a very low number (I don’t think more than five)…
I personally think, that Santis mockup is very interesting. Why? Because, it lets you save searches and is for me as someone who has “no” idea about faceted browsing panels “more intuitive”. Another advantage may be on small screens where the three mockups from Sivs might be problematic, because the elements cannot “collaps” and therefore need more space…. The only think that I miss is a “negative” or combined search, e.g. I’m looking for pictures and movies but not documents. Same with tags…
Anyway it really great to see, that it is beeing worked on. Thank you for that! just my 2 cents
I like the right one too. I don’t think the calendar is distracting, since one is supposed to see it only when searching for a file.
Maybe browsing for extensions/names should be provided with a more intuitive worda than “What?”.
Sante
I would drop the left panel because I feel it is little confusing because it has a background color, text as list on all and it feels technical.
I like a lot about the middle one, it could be stamped right away to dolphin right side now and it would look awesome. And it is simple to use, like the date selection is accurate enough if other selections (tags, type) filters more the results.
Although I have little problem to quess how would the tag selection work when having multiple tags. But I like the clear way to see selected tags on it. And I like a lot the button being pressed (following the style of course) on all of them. But what I just would change on the type selection (on all of them) is “All”, “Documents” what would mean all office files (text, spreadsheet, calenders, everything what is related to document types. And change the “Pictures” to “Images” what would of course show all pictures and photos and all other image types. The Media is good if it shows all sound/video typed (flash etc as well). Otherwise mayby needed to have a “Video” and “Sound”, but could make it harder to choose?
The third one is tough one. The calender is powerfull, but is it really a easy way? I would expect the calender on somekind “Advanced” filtering. Good thing with it would be I could select just to show week 43 files or all mondays files, more than the middle one. The calender view would filters lots of data by itself. But it is little tough call between these two and if possible, I would place middle time selection to basic and calender for the advanced. If just one, then the calender, but it should be nicely etched the panel like on the middle one, without the white background.
The tag selection on third one is familiar to current taggin, but that might be the problem. Because currently we do not use the cloud to search files, but to tag them. And what there was question, would the tag size be related to results or the popularity among all files?
If the tag size variates for result entry, it would make it easier to pinpoint the tags. But it would make the cloud change all the times.
If the tag size is about the tagging amount on files like current Dolphin has. It would remain stationary and could help remember the tags what were used. But if there is lots of tags, it is harder to use. This might be the reason why I would go to the second one.
When comparing overall look of all these three, I would take the second one. It follows the style and does not interrupt eyes when showing next to files. I would even keep the middle one all the time and use it to filter files.
The Santi’s mockup is intresting too. From there I would copy the idea to have a calender button on the original mockup of the second idea. So there would be easy way to just click “today, yesterday, last week, last month ” Then the simple date selection could change to calender view and we could have simple and advanced 😉
What comes the Santi’s mockup idea how to search among tags and types. I would suggest the way what is on digiKam now among tags, albums, metadata etc etc. It is well hidden bottom of the area and just filters them.
And if I would be bold enough, mayby I would add all three versions. But make all three parts as swappable. Making the topic of area “When?” “What?” and “What else?” to be a buttons what would swap that selection around with all these three. So everyone could build own kind column between all there choises for all three positions. It would make it harder but we could eliminate the lack of features and making the middle one as default one, we could have good default but still powerfull UI for those who need/wants more 😉
I prefer this version:
http://img248.imageshack.us/i/facets.png/
As most of people, I really like the right one : definitly cooler than the two others.
However it’s also the one who needs the more space… and on small screens, like netbooks ones, it must be quite unconfortable.
Maybe it should use the right one, and in the case the panel size is too low, using the middle one, which is also nice, easy, and take far more space.
As promised the mockup of the logarythmic slider for time.
maybe add fields for where? and who?
I like the second and the third better than the first. I think I like the third one best overall. Both the second and the third have some unique positives.
2nd Option
1) Nice clean look. Not cluttered. Fits in well with the theme.
2) Each option has consistency. A person would not have to re-learn how to interact with each section.
3rd Option
1) The sections relate to concepts used elsewhere.
2) This format allows for more options than the other formats.
3) Even the \new\ features of this format are not difficult to discover.
@18
Actually, the usability of the collapsing chooser decreases as the number of choices increases! None of these solutions scales really well for an arbitrary number of dimensions…
@Danni Coy
Nice idea for different way to show timeline. I would still take the calender because it shows the weekdays there. With calender I would like to see option to search on specific day (2009-11-31), a range of day (2009-10-31 – 2009-11-31), a week (week 31) or specific weekdays “all mondays from week 32 to 34”. And if just possible, with Ctrl-button presed, clickin days what wanted 😉
The selection from cloud is clear and simple. If that gets used it should be like that.
i prefer the right one.
just some thoughts to improve it a little bit:
Date:
– checkbox list for common cases (today, last week/month/year and two corresponding date fields with date chooser buttons (calendar popup to chase date friendly)
Type:
– also checkbox (intuitiv from html, multiple selection)
Tags:
– tag cloud (intuitiv again from web) with a search field (easy find tag 🙂 ) and possibility to select more than one tag (checkbox left from tag?)
Very nice work, I’m really waiting for that and I believe it will be a revolution. I’ve been using Copernic Desktop Search for a while at work and it’s incredible how much time it saves! But Copernic does not have such a nice UI, though it may be worth looking at for some ideas…
Like most of the other commenters I prefer the right design. I think presenting the appropriate widget for each type of facet is a *must*, otherwise it will end up being undistinguishable. Based on the other comments and my own ideas, I have made a list of points to consider on that basis:
1) adding where and who is an excellent idea: most of the time when I am looking for something, I know from whom it came and approximately where on my disks it lies (linked with a given project…). Being able to indicate that would narrow down the search and probably improve performance dramatically
2) to keep it scalable and offer a slim but powerful design, I see little chances that you can avoid collapsible widgets, either in the form of stacked widgets or better: present the most used items of each time and a “more” link that pops up or integrates a more complete dialog, like in digikam’s advanced search for instance. For each configured facet, when you hide the details you would need to print a small summary so that the user keeps an overview. Use tooltips if there isn’t enough room.
3) category names as shown here waste space, if the right widget is presented I think there is no need for them. If there really is, then they have to be visually different from the selectable items
4) the tag cloud is very sexy, but I wonder whether in a real-world scenario it would help or disturb. For one I currently don’t have any tagged document! The qutomatic extraction of keywords as presented in Sebastian’s blog a while back would sure be a nice idea there. But even if not tagged manually, it is likely that a lot of docs will share a fairly small number of tags, linked with my main activities and interests. So tags may not be very discriminating. If I look at how I proceed when I look for something (constrained by the Copernic UI, sure), most of the time I indicate a keyword to be looked for in the *full text index*, people (especially for mails), sometimes a date and a document type. A bit like when you search Google: you use keywords based on full text indexes. That approach seems to work rather well, is or has become intuitive and is going to remain important even with the advent of the semantic desktop. I think it is badly missing in your current proposal. Strigi can do that, we have to use it!
5) the calender widget is very nice as soon as you need to input a date, but it would be better to hide it and let the user call it by clicking on a “more” link, and instead present by default rough categories as dolphin already does when you show icons in groups, sorted by date
6) the logarithmic time slider sounds good, but I dout it is very usable. I’d rather imagine something like a magnifying glass, where you first select on a rough level (year), then zoom in on that year while keeping the other ones accessible through the sliders. And then you could zoom in on the month, week, day, etc… As soon as you click outside the magnified area, you switch back up one level. Something that would also be nice in combination with that is a pop-up that shows the number of items (again, like digikam’s timeline), but I don’t know how feasible that is from a performance perspective
7) regarding the types, I wonder is something like the laterally sliding view in kickoff could do the trick. You could select main categories and possibly drill down (e.g. to image types, etc), but only if you want to. What I am unsure about is the need for multiple selections or not.
8) final comment (sorry, I know it’s long but I’m so enthusiastic!): think about saved searches, as there are definitely things one keeps looking for. Once you’ve done a search it should be easy to save it, and later retrive it to do just the same or fine-tune it from the existing basis
Looks like a lot of work if you were to implement all of that, but the direction is good and the potential simply overwhelming! Keep up the good work.
I think the most important aspects of such a panel are
(1) many and flexible combinable options to chose from,
(2) easy to use, even for unexperienced users, and
(3) not using much screen space, in particular on small devices.
I think a combination of the first and last would be good, although it surely can be improved. I think lists are good, because they only use a limited amount of screen compared with the other possibilities, even for a longer list. To emphasize more important options (like most used tags) the list might be sorted or the list elements or backgrounds colored differently. The calender is a excellent idea, because it gives the user immediate feedback on the selected time frame; it could also allow a more specific selection of dates than possible with just the categories. For usability purposes it is important to keep in mind that some of the listed options can be selected together with other ones (today _and_ yesterday, tag1 _and_ tag2), which should reflect in the gui.
Good ideas so far, keep it up!
you should have a look at this:
http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/cat/215/mobiele-telefoons.html
These grey-in-grey things take too long to figure out. The ones in the left column are far easier, since they offer *a lot* more contrast.
I do like the calendar thing.
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Great work, Siv! 🙂
Now, maybe I’ll look like an outlier here, but what I think is that the leftmost panel is the best one… if you apply a slight change.
Think of a menu like the one used in OpenOffice.org:
I would use some tabs like “Time” (in which to group, say, the already shown menu along with the calendar and the interval selection box), “Type” (to specify not only the type of the document but also other information as, say, the encoding), and so on. Another solution would be to group the current facets in a “General” tab and to create other tabs while new facet categories are set up.
I mean, when more than three facets will be used, a clean yet powerful system to manage them will be necessary.
printed: I’ll think about that.
be patient… 😀