Post-UX-testing improvements tracking

[cpcallen]

On 28–29th November, members of the Micro:bit Educational Foundation conducted two days of user experience testing with children ages 8–14. This is a tracking bug for possible improvements noted during that testing by @cpcallen.

Nothing in this list should be taken to be a specific plan or decision to make any particular changes; this issue merely transcribes the actionable portion of the notes into a format that makes it easier to track which items are being worked on as issues (bugs or FRs), PRs and/or discussions, since GitHub wikis pages do not autolink those. It is anticipated that items below will be replaced with links to other issues (or PRs or discussions) with additional detail and commentary.

Bugs

• 80

  • Fixed during testing by #82—but probably needs a rethink due to other issues.

• 81

  • Partially fixed during testing by #83.
• Second colour picker doesn't work on first try
• No visual indicator when you press esc to leave workspace
• Something funny about cut/copy/paste—awaiting repro from Lucy or Kirsty
• Disconnect shortcut broken, probably by cursor -> select change
• Shortcuts help should all fit on one page (if possible), or scroll with arrow keys
• Newly-created blocks should not overlap existing blocks
• Can no longer click on workspace to focus
• Cursor does not follow mouse selection
• Can't select topmost next/previous connection in sub stack
• Cursoring up does not select intermediate connections

Feature requests

• Visible button (to which one can tab) for shortcuts dialog
• Tab to toolbox/workspace/out—without needing to enter/escape
• Auto-prompt shortcuts help the first time you use keyboard shortcuts
• Insert key should do something useful
• Left arrow takes to toolbox (perhaps requires enforced tidyness)
• Instead of marker: open a space (as if insertion marker) and take cursor to toolbox directly to choose block to place
• Pop-up shortcut help when you press (or hold) control / command?
• Copy and paste to place blocks from toolbox
• Should be possible to get to toolbox directly from other parts of the page
  • Probably best done by tab stop, since 't' shortcut might cause issues for surrounding app.
• Pop-up hint (to use escape/tab) when you try to arrow out of the workspace / toolbox?
• Some affordance to hint to users that they can use right arrow to access fields/inputs on a block.
• Some affordance when the cursor is on a connector (esp. with simple reporter shadow blocks) to help users understand that they can move to the block/field.
• Drag blocks with keyboard
  • Affordance (3d shadow?) to indicate bock being dragged?
• Affordances for inserting/replacing blocks:
  • Open a (small) gap while chosing a statement block from the toolbox.
  • Move existing value block aside (possibly with linking line) while choosing a value block from the toolbox.

Other / for discussion

• Marker is not intuitive
• Use copy and paste for placing blocks?
  • Enter to copy, pop up message inviting you to paste where you want?
• "/" is probably not a good help shortcut, as "?" is not always on "/"
• Educational materials will direct users to the toolbox first, not to the place that the new block is going.
• What should happen when you press enter on a block?
  • Select (for copy/paste)?—if block is not already selected by virtue of cursor movement.
  • Move cursor to toolbox to replace?
  • Move to first/only field (possibly on shadow block?) and edit it?
• Should Blockly workspace be greyed out when it does not have focus?
  • Probably not, as would be weird if using mouse.

[r8n5n]

Hi Everyone,

For your reference this is the discussion guide we used for the Accessibility testing we did last week (October 28/ 29th).

Thanks

[kmcnaught]

Hi Christopher,

• What should happen when you press enter on a block?

  • Select (for copy/paste)?—if block is not already selected by virtue of cursor movement.
  • Move cursor to toolbox to replace?
  • Move to first/only field (possibly on shadow block?) and edit it?

Additional options here (for discussion - not necessarily voting for them)

• Prompt keyboard shortcut hints for available actions (e.g. move right to edit fields / copy /delete)
• Open context menu

Some short videos from playing around with copy/paste workflows. I'm not sure if I've captured everything that was observed, but there's definitely a few weird behaviours:

1. Whole stack is selected sometimes when you paste while on a block rather than insertion point
2. Unexpected re-arranging when pasting - not a biggie, maybe it's doing The Right Thing (TM) as per the layout algorithm, but it looked strange
3. Pasting a block on a connector results in double paste
4. Two keyboard focus points visible after using mouse
5. Right click menu counts fields as blocks - I think that's what's happening, anyway. It may be semantically correct but not intuitive.
6. Deleting a connector deletes the block

fwiw I kept thinking I'd found new bugs and then discovering I'd forgotten to mark the destination - I for one am definitely failing at learning that flow!

[kmcnaught]

New one... I've struggled to strip back to a minimal repro but you can see it in these 2 videos (towards the end of both)

video 1 video 2

My best description:

• Sometimes when you paste without an appropriate mark, it fails to paste, but then when you hit Ctrl+Z it pastes at least one if not a whole stack of blocks into a floating position.
• It may require one or both of these variants:
  • using cut instead of copy
  • having a mark, then losing it by deleting the block next to it