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 