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openpaperwork / paperwork

Personal document manager (Linux/Windows) -- Moved to Gnome's Gitlab
https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/OpenPaperwork/paperwork
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UI Idea : Need a general/index/summary view #548

Open jerrydiff opened 7 years ago

jerrydiff commented 7 years ago

Let me start from the begining, when you enter paperwork, you are directely in the action, you arrive in the middle of your last documents, and .. thats it. I've seen poeple start paperwork and dont understand it was a document archive tool, because it mostly looks like an explorer windows with a research function. For some poeple, its an interface for scanning that lets you see the last document you have scanned.

It feels to me that it lacks what could be named a summary, or an index, a view that would provide with a glance what actually is in store, that provide a classification and reassure the user that his documents are indeed well organised, well classified, accounted for.

Here are a few starting ideas for this view, it should help reply to this question : how much documents are in each category, what are the main categories, how much documents have failed the automatic tagging (and if there's none, say it !), how many electric bills do i have stored, how many documents are in a single / multiple categories and so on

Users are very used to being abused by softwares, silent errors, lost datas without warning, etc. they need some kind of metric and feedback to be assured it is actually working. Sometimes, a stupid green indicator saying all stuff are ok since last time goes a long way. I must say paperwork works honnestly quite well, I know it, but it does not advertise in anyway during the time you interract with it. A summary would help in that regard, it gives the feeling that everything is well organized

tiramiseb commented 7 years ago

I agree. A "home screen" with at least a documents count, list of labels, etc, would be great and reassuring.

jflesch commented 7 years ago

Ok then, the first step is to figure out exactly what we want to display.

Obviously, we should have the total number of documents. But what else ? I guess some statistics regarding labels could make sense. However, which one exactly ? And which representations (histogram, pie chart, ...) ?

tYYGH commented 7 years ago

I would appreciate: — a list of most-accessed (most clicked-on) documents (there is for example “Échéancier” (FR) documents that I read every month) ; — a list of the most-used searches.

jflesch commented 7 years ago

Hm, interesting ideas. Regarding the most-used searches, it's kind-of-related to #119 I think.

jerrydiff commented 7 years ago

I also like something dynamic with the most accessed doc / used search, maybe a few of the most recent to remind of the latest activity

I would like something more static as well, like a summary of the content of the archive with a list of tags ordered by number of associated files

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

I agree too. Here is a first shot. Feel free to comment!

jflesch commented 7 years ago

Looks cool, but no document list on the left ? oO

tiramiseb commented 7 years ago

Same comment than jflesch. I think the document list must remain visible.

jerrydiff commented 7 years ago

I really like that mockup, not sure the document list is mandatory, maybe a button to jump to the complete document list would be fitting ?

jflesch commented 7 years ago

I think it is. Quite often I just want to access the latest document I've scanned / imported.

tiramiseb commented 7 years ago

For the sake of consistency, I think the document list must always be visible...

jerrydiff commented 7 years ago

ok, I am already blow up that this got so much positive ideas and replies, so I am all for it as well

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

I think it is. Quite often I just want to access the latest document I've scanned / imported.

Maybe my mockup was not explicit enough. The "Recent" section shows thumbnails of the 3 latests documents, with an excerpt of the very latest. Why would one need the whole document list?

For the sake of consistency, I think the document list must always be visible...

It feels to me that it would defeat the purpose of what @jerrydiff suggests: a "welcome" screen to avoid putting users in action too abruptly.

ok, I am already blow up that this got so much positive ideas and replies, so I am all for it as well

Do not change your mind so fast! ;-)

tYYGH commented 7 years ago

As far as I’m concerned, I do want to see the document list on launch, even though I am interested in a welcome screen… in the right panel.

Viewing the document list tells me at a glance what are the last 10 or so documents that I imported, and which of these are from real papers (ie. on my paper stack), compared to those that came through e-mail.

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

Second shot. Thoughts?

tiramiseb commented 7 years ago

I prefer the second one, however the "recent document" part is not needed: it is on the left...

tYYGH commented 7 years ago

+1 @tiramiseb

jerrydiff commented 7 years ago

I must say I prefer the first one since there is room for 3 columns of labels and 3 filters instead of 2

jerrydiff commented 7 years ago

also the paper/page/label/filter/size snippet is very important, its probably the most important part, It really needs to fit somewhere imho

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

Hum. Thanks for your feedback, folks. It seems that we raised in this topic at least four issues:

  1. Users are (too) directly put in action, UX is a bit harsh.
  2. Some Users don't understand what paperwork is for: is it a file manager? Is it a scanner application? Is it a document reader?
  3. Different users have different flows: some often access the same papers, others need to see the last imports, some just archive papers and never read them, some heavily use labels...
  4. A few numbers about what is in store would be nice.

Your comments tend to show that having the file panel on startup is ok and we do not need a whole new screen for welcoming users. Please find new mockups here.

tYYGH commented 7 years ago

Happy New Year!

@mjourdan I like your second Overview Pane mockup better, because it is inside the window, and the window is probably already on the left side of the screen, if not maximized. The first mockup would either have the new Pane appear partly out of view, or shift/resize the window unnecessarily.

Some questions:

Rel. “A few numbers about what is in store would be nice”, I suppose you would like some stats from some users; here are mine: 2210 documents, spanning 25 years; 57 labels, with 12 being used less than 10 times (min. 1), 17 being used more than 100 times (max. 762); 25 documents with no labels, 202 with 1 label, 704 with 2 labels, 886 with 3 labels, 385 with 4 labels, 8 with 5 labels.

jflesch commented 7 years ago

@mjourdan : I clearly prefer your second mockup. As @tYYGH pointed out, it avoids various annoying issues relative to the window size.

Just some random idea : Starting from your second mockup, maybe we could make it possible to click on the stats below (number of documents, number of pages, etc). It could then display much more detailed statistics in the 'document-area'.

BTW, just from a technical standpoint, it's possible for me to display charts (pies, bar chart, etc).

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

@tYYGH:

I suppose you would like some stats from some users Actually I was thinking about finding a way to display those stats inside the GUI, as discribed by @jflesch (yeah, could be nice to have some visual stuff like charts). Thank you anyway.

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

The welcome screen I talked about is under #563, @tYYGH.

Would be glad to read your thoughts about that on this new ticket, folks.

jflesch commented 7 years ago

(label 'to study' removed --> the 2nd mockup is just what we need IMHO).

jflesch commented 7 years ago

I'm going to start working on this one.

However, I think I will merge a little the ideas from the 1st mockup with the 2nd one: I will go with the 2nd mockup, but in "Recent", I will display the last 3 documents used instead of just the last one. IMHO, having just one document in "Recent" reduce too much the usefulness of this feature. The 2 others will be displayed below the first one, will be smaller, and will be on the same line. Only their thumbnail and labels will be displayed, but no text. (I will display the first one as in the 2nd mockup).

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

Have you heard about libdazzle? Christian Hergert introduced this here (there are a couple more videos on his youtube channel). It could help to make nice sliding panels.

jflesch commented 7 years ago

No I didn't know it. And even just the suggestion box could be handy for the search field, because my current implementation is quite buggy (most of the time, suggestions don't even appear at all ...)

jflesch commented 7 years ago

The documentation is sometimes very .. succinct, but still, using this library could help quite a lot. The only problem is that it means another extra non-python dependency .. that is not packaged in Debian yet ... :/. Time to make Flatpak work I guess.

jflesch commented 7 years ago

I've noted the URLs. I'll have a better look at it later. In the meantime, I see nothing in libdazzle that could be useful for this ticket (or did I miss something in your mockups ?), so I'll keep working on it with just my current tools :)

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

I was thinking of a push effect to reveal the left pane. I think it is better to have both the filter panel and the document list side-by-side, to make it clear the later depends on the former. Otherwise, having the document list to be refreshed hidden by the filter panel could confuse user. I thought libdazzle could help for this (as well as for resizing the document pane like this).

Besides libdazzle, I didn't get how you were intending to merge the left pane with the overview mode. So I tried to make a mockup implementing a "recent" filter in the left pane. Does it match what you mean?

jflesch commented 7 years ago

Hm, I see. The push effect is an interesting idea. It could work. And Libdazzle is not required for that. The push effect can easily be done with a GtkRevealer. And regarding the resizing video, it's actually showing how the text in the GtkTree is updated, but I don't use GtkTree and based on your mockup, I won't even have to resize the document list. .. but I'm a little bit lost ; Is the left pane part of this ticket ? oO

By "overview mode", do you mean the summary (last documents opened, statistics, etc) ? If so, I don't really how it is related to the left pane ?

jflesch commented 7 years ago

I'm going to assume the left pane part of this ticket too, because I don't know of any other ticket about that. However, I'll start by making the summary view, and then work on the left pane

jflesch commented 7 years ago

https://github.com/openpaperwork/paperwork/commit/d9167a5ffe3e71bc8cf44d530d5288956932e186 : Keep track of the last documents and the last searches made

jflesch commented 7 years ago

1686db5dd2c68615d2047554882c17dc74878e1c : switch between summary view / document content view (summary view is pretty much empty for now)

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

By "overview mode", I was thinking about one of those landing pages, which I think you were talking about when speaking of "I will display the last 3 documents used instead of just the last one."

But as you stated on 23 april, to me it was clear that the relevant proposal to solve this issue was the overview pane. Reading your message from yesterday, I was very surprise to read you were thinking of implementing some mix of the twos.

In my opinion, the overview/landing page mentioned above breaks the UX, ans is totally obsoleted by a separate set of features:

Sorry if things got confused here. The "experiments" folder in my repo is for getting feedback only, it's a bit risky to start implementing stuff landing there. Anyway, I'll take a look at your instable branch to see what you had in mind, perhaps it works better than what I draw.

jflesch commented 7 years ago

For me, the left pane has a goal entirely different from the summary (landing page number 2).

The left pane is complementary of the search dialog. Except it's not about building one search, but about managing set of searches.

The summary is .. well, a summary of what you have in store. It's about getting statistics and a bird-eye view. I assume you mean it breaks the UI because this space is usually used to display document content, right ? But even currently, when you start Paperwork, you have a basic welcome screen (Paperwork logo + version).

So actually, having both could make sense to me.

Or we could put everything in the left pane (last searches, last documents, saved searched, etc). I guess it could make sense too.

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

For me, the left pane has a goal entirely different from the summary (landing page number 2).

Hmm. On the contrary, I see a bit of overlapping. As stated on a previous comment, we can find in this ticket at least 4 different issues. IMHO, the left pane does provide numbers in a bird's-eye view, to see what's currently in store. The summary in that regard doesn't provide more value (if you compare the mockups, you'll see there is almost equal info in the left pane and in the overview). It breaks the UI because it appears in place of the content but doesn't behave like actual documents. Moreover, the excerpt of the recent papers would probably be better replaced with fixing #623 for the whole document list.

Sure, we could imagine having deeper statistics, for example giving the progression on the past few months and making projections on how much space will be consumed. But that would deserve a whole separate ticket I think.

Or we could put everything in the left pane (last searches, last documents, saved searched, etc). I guess it could make sense too.

That's already pretty much the case, a part from recent (which is worth adding and already figures on some of my sketches) and last searches (which are not that useful, are they?). Though that 3 columns layout needs proper wireframes (I'm working on it).

mjourdan commented 7 years ago

I made the wireframes I talked about to deal with this 3 columns layout. Thoughts welcome, folks.

jflesch commented 6 years ago

I'm starting to think you're right and this summary is pretty much made useless by the 3rd column.

Regarding the 3 columns layout, I'm wondering: Instead of a 3rd columns, why not just switch the content of the columns like done currently with document properties ? It would use much less space on the screen. (I may have already asked that, but I don't remember the answer)

mjourdan commented 6 years ago

Regarding the 3 columns layout, I'm wondering: Instead of a 3rd columns, why not just switch the content of the columns like done currently with document properties ? It would use much less space on the screen.

This is indeed an option. I would expect the following benefits:

  1. Having both the filters column and the document list visible should make more obvious how they are related.
  2. On big hi-def screens, using the space actualy available would allow a convenient and very fast way to apply filters.
  3. Biggest reason is everything would be visible on startup; user would both have an overview of what's in store, what are the most recent documents, and could read the latest one

On the other hand:

  1. Indeed, on small screens, a new column would eat space needed for more valuable content. That's why I tried to design so the software would remain perfectly usable with that column hidden.
  2. Maybe a "previous" button would be easier to use than a dropdown to change the layout.

Before implementing anything, I think I should make some prototypes for user testing to know which works best. :/

(I may have already asked that, but I don't remember the answer)

I don't think you did, or sorry if I missed something.

jflesch commented 6 years ago

Before implementing anything, I think I should make some prototypes for user testing to know which works best. :/

Prototypes or mockups ?

I don't think you did, or sorry if I missed something.

Nah, don't worry, I have a pretty crappy memory at times, so I probably never asked in a first place. (sometimes I'm surprised I haven't driven my girlfriend mad yet ... :)

mjourdan commented 6 years ago

Prototypes or mockups ?

Prototypes, that is to say interactive mockups. I would like to give a try to gravit designer (this is nonfree software :-( )

Nah, don't worry, I have a pretty crappy memory at times, so I probably never asked in a first place. (sometimes I'm surprised I haven't driven my girlfriend mad yet ... :)

Maybe you did, it's just you don't remember :-p

mjourdan commented 6 years ago

I gave a try to Gravit Designer for an other project, and prefer to keep Inkscape for Paperwork. I am not sure Gravit actually features prototyping anyway.

I made some more iterations on the idea of an overview pane. Here is what it could look like. Thoughts?

jflesch commented 6 years ago

1) Search dialog: looks cool :)

2) Other mockups: I'm really not fond of the idea of having 2 left-side columns at any point. Even less fond of having one pushing the rest of the window content. As stated before, I still think this is going to be messy to manage: When displaying the extra column, do we extend the window to the right ? If we don't, what happens if the window was too small ? In other words, I think sliding things may end up being a problem.

My 2 cents: Both columns are about search. So it would make sense to display both at the very same place and switch them as we do currently with the document list and the document properties. When paperwork starts, it display first the overview column. In the overview, we make everything clickable (for instance the label names) --> one click and it switches to the search result list.

Regarding large screen, there is another way we could use them: We could display the document properties to the right side of the window (I think I remember seeing that in one of your other mockups ?). I think it would nicely enforce the idea "left = document listing ; right = current document", no ?

mjourdan commented 6 years ago

Thanks for discussing this!

As stated before, I still think this is going to be messy to manage: When displaying the extra column, do we extend the window to the right ? If we don't, what happens if the window was too small ? In other words, I think sliding things may end up being a problem.

The size of the column wouldn't change, because the content of the document viewer would also slide. This would eventually make one part of the page being out of bounds, as (not) shown on the mockups.

Both columns are about search.

Not quite. In my mind, each column shows the children of the previous one:

To me it seems natural to show simultaneously parents and children side-by-side, just like we already do with the documents list and the reader.

So it would make sense to display both at the very same place and switch them as we do currently with the document list and the document properties. When paperwork starts, it display first the overview column. In the overview, we make everything clickable (for instance the label names) --> one click and it switches to the search result list.

Ok, I'll do some mockups for that!

Regarding large screen, there is another way we could use them: We could display the document properties to the right side of the window (I think I remember seeing that in one of your other mockups ?). I think it would nicely enforce the idea "left = document listing ; right = current document", no ?

There! Yep, that would be a nice move disregarding the overview issue. Though this would be of little benefit for large screens, as this is not something useful enough for keeping it open permanently, even less simultaneously with the documents list.

mjourdan commented 6 years ago

I uploaded new mockups to presentator.io, in the hope we could get a feeling of what works best. You'll see on hover you can click on certain zones and discover what happens then. Sadly, this is no true prototype solution.

Nevertheless, it's here: https://app.presentator.io/fr/APieffK2?v=2&s=1&m=preview (do not forget to try both variant 3 and variant 4!)

As usual, you know you can speak frankly! Do tell me what you would like to see if you want to go deeper into variant 4.

mjourdan commented 6 years ago

I updated the overview pane mockups with new variants. I think numbers 6 and 7 are worth taking a look at, because they basically keep the fix-width 2 panels layout, while keeping context and the most interesting stuff visible.

jflesch commented 6 years ago

The variant #4 feels clearly cleaner to me.

mjourdan commented 6 years ago

Really it's the one I like the least:

So maybe this looks cleaner, but I feel like this would fail to give an "overview" and would be really the less usable of all the experiments here.

@jerrydiff , @tiramiseb , @tYYGH , maybe you have an opinion on this?