Desura pull down menu

[Protektor-Desura]

We need to reorder the list in the pull down so it follows closer to most application setups/standards.

I believe it should be:

Console History Tools Settings (separator here) Offline Logout (remove) Help About Exit

Wouldn't offline and logout give you the same effect. In both cases the client is still running and you are not logged in to the service. I am not sure that Logout is helpful when Offline would give you give you the logout but you just wouldn't be able to surf the website. I don't understand why you would want to surf the website logged out in the client.

Thoughts on this?

[ssokolow]

I'm not sure that particular ordering is much better (Why are "Help" and "About" down between "Offline" and "Exit", for example?) but I'm also wondering if having a pull-down behind the logo is a good idea in the first place.

Even when I know it's there, I often find myself getting lost because I'm looking in the "Support" tab for "Help", "Settings" and "Tools" or in either the Support tab or the Community tab for "History".

If I'm any indication of an average user, then it'd probably make more sense to rework the UI so there isn't such a mismatch between the breadcrumb trail in the toolbar and the menu.

Maybe something like this:

• Put both Settings and Tools (Since they're different tabs on the same page anyway) behind a wrench icon in the toolbar where it'll blend in with the rest of the icons most of the time, but jump out at you when you're looking for it and be obvious when someone clicks "Support" then looks for a "Settings" option.
• Put Help, About, and Console in a menu triggered by an icon in the extreme top-right corner of the UI (maybe a question mark inside a circle) since, at the narrowest width the UI allows, there's still plenty of room there and all major platforms' UI conventions tend to put access to help on the right end of the menu bar. (Help menu, old MacOS Balloon Help, Context Help button, etc.)

I'm starting to get drowsy, so I'll think about History, Offline, and Exit once I have my full faculties.

[ssokolow]

Sorry for letting one night become two months. Here's the rest of the idea.

For History:

• Shopping Cart is already a permanently-visible icon in the lower toolbar and there's not really a reason to have it under History.
• App Changelog can join Help, About, and Console in the Help/? menu I'm proposing.
• "Gifts History" and "Purchase History" and "CD Keys" intuitively go together and could become tabs in a tabbed page similar to "Settings". I don't yet have any strong ideas on where the button to access it would best fit, but one place which wouldn't be bad and where there's plenty of room is to the right of the "Games" and "Favorites" buttons in the "Play" tab.

"Go Offline" and "Exit" could either appear exclusively on the tray icon (given that there's precedent for doing that to Offline/Exit options in applications designed to stay resident and watch for updates) or they could stay on the button.

Either way, with the logo menu pruned down to just "status control" icons, I'd suggest:

• Making the active region include the user's avatar.
• Renaming "Logout" to "Switch User".

This is a lot of text, so here's an annotated mockup to help clarify my suggestions.

[Protektor-Desura]

I like the mockup. My only question is would records be obvious for finding your missing keys that you need for games. I am also not sure that you need the tab name to come up next to the home button. I think it is or should be obvious what tab you are in because of the color changes that flow down in to the bar with the home button. The home button is also context sensitive, which at first confused me to death until I realized it. I am not convinced that a context sensitive home button is the way to go, or at least change the icon to something else so you aren't expecting one thing a getting another result.

[ssokolow]

If discoverability is an issue, why not put a small, clickable key icon next to "Ready" for games which require CD keys? (Either to the right, permanently, or to the left but only immediately after install) ...or add a "CD Key" item to the context menu. (Though I would also want to keep it under records for non-client users and users who want a summary view.)

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "I am also not sure that you need the tab name to come up next to the home button." Could you clarify that?

As for the context-sensitive home button, I agree that it's confusing but, in accordance with the bug title, I was trying to limit the scope of my mockup to things in the pull-down menu and anything directly related to them. (Otherwise, I'd have also mocked up the proposed solutions for #62 and #134 and looked for other ways to polish up the inbox/updates/threadwatch portion of UI.)

[Protektor-Desura]

Well I personally think using this particular bug thread to deal with potential UI issues would be fine. Just remember that some of the things the client shows is actually HTML from the server.

[ssokolow]

I am aware that much of the content is server-side. It's one of the reasons I chose to show the Play tab in the mockup.

For example, "Gifts History", "Purchase History", and "CD Keys" are obviously server-side pages, so to put them together in one tabbed pane under the records tab will either require server-side changes (to do it properly) or the use of some mix of XMLHttpRequest, <iframe>, and/or jQuery('body') (or equivalent) to grab them and turn them into tabs on the client side.

As for amending the mockup, I have quite a bit of coursework placing demands on my time right now, but I'll try to at least squeeze in my proposed solution for CD key discoverability reasonably soon.

[ssokolow]

I decided that the existing annotations got in the way of mocking up the best solution for making keys easily discoverable, so here's a separate mockup for that and the icon changes visible from the Play tab:

http://i.imgur.com/CI7ZA.png

[Protektor-Desura]

I would like to propose changing the lightning icon used to say you should be running the full version instead of the demo version you have installed. I propose a triangle with a ! in the middle. There is no easy icon to display upgrade versus update. Both have up arrows used for them generally, or rotating arrows. The problem with rotating arrows is that browsers use it for reload, yet software packages use it to mean upgrade.I think the ! would show that hey you should take a look at this, since users are going to want to run the full version whenever possible.

[ssokolow]

There are noteworthy applications which actually use rotating arrows for upgrades in a sense other than as a throbber? (indeterminate progress indicator) Mind giving me some examples? (I'm honestly curious which ones I missed)

I actually recognized the need for a more intuitive "this is a demo" icon, but, at the time I made that mockup, nothing was coming to mind as more appropriate.

However, for the alert icon (the generally-agreed-upon name for the triangle with an exclamation mark in the middle), general use and Human Interface Guidelines have built up carefully-crafted connotations to it which you don't want to muck up:

• It implies a problem needing to be addressed. Users may react badly to the implication that "you haven't given us money" is being presented in that light. (As you no doubt know, selling indie games is based on building a comfortable relationship with customers. We want to avoid anything that gives the impression that Desura cares too strongly about getting the user's money.)
• It implies something that needs immediate attention. That means it will wear on users if the only way to quickly dismiss it is to pay. If users don't simply avoid demos, then it will dilute the sense of urgency that is supposed to be associated with other uses of the icon. (It also may push the feel silghtly more in the direction of high-pressure sales tactics and people don't like that.)
• When using icons, you don't want to conflate two concepts the user considers distinct. For example, just because the starburst from the toolbar means "Updates" doesn't mean it would serve as a good alternative to the update arrow. Users intuitively separate the "notifications" meaning of "updates" from the "upgrades" meaning.
• At some point in the future, it may be desirable to add a "there's a problem with this game" icon and that would be a better use for the alert symbol. In such a case, not only would you have to get users to notice that the meaning of the symbol changed, you'd have to re-train them to feel the appropriate sense of urgency.

How about using a dollar sign or other locale-appropriate currency symbol instead? That's connotatively appropriate (click here to buy), implies that it's not the full product, and the only potentially-undesirable connotations it might carry are already present in the concept of paying for the full version of a game.

Yes, it implies that the icon should never be shown to users who've bought the full game but installed the demo, but my tests seem to indicate that is already the case and, if you've bought the full version, then installing the demo isn't really something you can do by accident. (And if you're installing the demo purposefully, then having an icon would be like having an icon warning you that you made a conscious decision to install the 32-bit version rather than the 64-bit one)

[Protektor-Desura]

The current lightning icon only appears if you have already bought the full version of the game but you have the demo version of the game installed, instead of the full version which you own. We are not pushing users to purchase the game. We are letting them know, "Hey you don't have to play the demo anymore because you bought/own the full version."

I was not suggesting any icon next to demos that are installed if you didn't buy the game yet. Demos already have demo in the title of the game to let users know they have the demo not the full game.

[ssokolow]

Then there's a bug in the non-GPL release version I usually use. (Waiting for Jookia's 80C branch to be merged so I only have to fuddle with the paths once. The GPL builds currently see themselves as having nothing installed.) I always see it next to demos where I don't own the full thing and it's never appeared in my tests where I explicitly choose to install a demo.

(The only time I saw it appear next to a game I owned was when I had World of Goo's full version installed and could select it from the context menu but the Desura site got confused and forgot that I'd received it via my Humble Bundle key)

As for the intended use of the icon, I just got up, so I'm drowsy, but I'll try to think of some appropriate iconography for that once I'm more alert.

[ssokolow]

Maybe a modified version of the upgrade arrow I proposed. After all, if you've already paid for it, going from demo to full version is basically a special kind of upgrade.

[Jookia]

80D branch will probably only be merged within this week. I still need some time. I was just hit with a wave of depression that I need to get back to tolerating.

[karolherbst]

what should we do about this now?

[Jookia]

I have no idea.

[Protektor-Desura]

ssokolow did a mock-up of what we discussed about how things should look. I believe all we need to do is move things around so it matches the mock-up listed above.

[Jookia]

Let's push this to the mac release for now.