better follow HIG in UI
Bug #496878 reported by
Michael Rooney
This bug affects 1 person
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
wxBanker |
Fix Released
|
Medium
|
Michael Rooney |
Bug Description
Generally main window could be made slicker by following i.e. Gnome HIG (or just by adding some paddings to elements and better aligning them along the grid). But I say that because I like looks of most Gnome apps.
Changed in wxbanker: | |
assignee: | nobody → arty (me-arty) |
importance: | Undecided → Medium |
milestone: | none → 0.7 |
status: | New → Incomplete |
Changed in wxbanker: | |
status: | Confirmed → In Progress |
Changed in wxbanker: | |
status: | Fix Committed → Fix Released |
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This is my first approach to better design. Unfortunately it mixes padding illustrations with some new ideas (I'm not a graphic designer, so even this drawing took me way too much time).
First: I've added some paddings to table, though these are not too visible. I aligned column contents with column titles, and increased row height by 2px.
Second: I've added more space between account names and "Accounts" title. Also I've removed useless colons.
Third: this is not displayed on design, but it would be nice to draw a line for current date in summary graph. I use wxBanker to know how much I can spend given my expected income, so current date is somewhere in the middle of graph and that's not too convenient.
Following are my ideas on how to generally improve interface.
First: when you need to choose only one item of many, you should use radio buttons. These are much easier to understand then links buttons, only one of which may be active at a time. So I'm pretty sure this idea should be implemented.
Second: "Hide zero-balance accounts" should be named "Show zero-balance accounts" and should be moved to Settings menu (unless it is used every 10 minutes, which I doubt).
Third: "Case Sensitive" checkbox should be moved to Settings menu too (this is based on assumption that most users change this option once in their lives) and named "Case-sensitive search".
Fourth is somewhat speculative. I suppose that when you search all your accounts for something, you do not care for current account. Thus we can remove combobox "where to search: current account or all accounts" and replace it with extra radio button for accounts total. Any time you need to search whole database for something, you enter search terms and just activate "Total" radio button. Bonus: you can see transactions for all your accounts, which is now impossible.
Another speculative idea about search is that most times you do not need to choose what field to search. I'm pretty sure that people will be happy if search goes across all fields, so users won't need to switch anything. I can predict two conflicts: search for 12 dollars will show all transactions in december (12th month) and search for some amount may match same number in description field. Both of these are solved by adding currency to number: search for "$12" or "12 руб" will match only amounts column.
Fifth: I'm pretty sure that current place of account buttons is not a good one. My design shows that these should be put on a toolbar. Text label on at least one of them is an easy way to get what these buttons are for — accounts. That toolbar is a good place to put search field too. In this design I used Gnome stock icons for buttons.
Concerning calculator I do not use it, so I might not see issues with it. I've got two ideas nevertheless. First is to move calculator switch to toolbar (probably duplicated by checkbox in settings menu). Second is not to use built-in calculator, but run system calculator when user clicks that button. I do not insist on these.
That's all for now, I haven't thought yet of transaction adding interface.