| F105448: home_v10.png | |
| Jan 28 2014, 4:57 AM |
| Current Revision |
|---|
A rough v0.0.01 concept of a logged out homepage.
This looks great to me. A couple of general questions:
Yeah, I think this is all pretty basic, plus I can play with an abs. positioned feed in my own sandbox once it's in. Let me design out an 'edit' version, I think we'll have to have a logged-in logged-out view for people to see, edit, and save.
I've just set up my first Phabricator instance and worked my way through everything. What I can tell so far is that the current homepage design is not very beginner friendly. There's a lot of applications available and it's hard to figure out what is used and what is really needed. A way to sort the application bar in groups like this design would help a lot.
Is something like this still being worked on currently or has focus shifted to other areas?
You can customize the Phabricator homepage through Dashboards, including one that matches the mock above (included as a default option).
Seems to be the old one? I also like the grouped applications more than the current view. Hope #T4103 is allowing custom UX presets soon. Controlling that especially new users see just the applications that are important to them would improve user acceptance a lot.
The problem is there little reason to need "apps" if you have a dialed in Dashboard to your workflow. 98% of the things I visit are either on my Dashboard or via some notification channel.
Most apps run off of "ApplicationSearch" engine. You can build and save custom views of filtered information in the app. Then you can take that custom saved view and attach it to a Dashboard, and set as your homepage. It's an individual, clunky process currently we hope to improve, but very powerful and once you have one dialed in to your specific workflow.
You can customize your app sidebar already, but it's up to the user to choose what they pin and it's order, not the admin. The admin can uninstall applications outright (for instance if you're not using Maniphest).
We'll be getting rid of the "really really old default" homepage here probably in a few months. It pre-dates Dashboards and we just never fully switched over.
@chad: the old sidenav - yeah, the old one. I really like that (a) the types of applications are grouped and (b) I keep could the important ones long and at the top while the less important but still useful ones are smaller.
I do use the dashboard as my primary workflow, but as an admin and power user going to individual apps is also really common.
also cool in this mock is that you can press the + on maniphest and macro really easily: beta applications are clear, etc.
When Phabricator used this UI, we consistently got feedback from many, many new users that it was overwhelming. In particular, it presented ~30 applications while the modern default navigation presents about ~10.
Consistent feedback from new users about the old new user experience being confusing/overwhelming was one of the driving factors in simplifying it, and I believe it generally worked and that we receive much less of this feedback now.
At least from the feedback we've seen, it appears that most new users found the older 30-option tiles far more confusing than the newer 10-option menu, so I think you're in the minority if the 30-option tiles seem more approachable to you as a new user.
You can click "Applications" to see the applications divided into groups, similar to the old navigation.
I'm not commenting as a new user but as a power-user and sometimes admin. I like having the ability to have both tiles and double-length icons. By default I'd put very few applications up.
I can imagine that once you get used to Phabricator and certain workflows develop you'll easily navigate through the UI and find what you need.
What I found that as a new user myself, when in front of an empty, unconfigured Phabricator, I wasn't sure where to start "doing things". This is not a problem, as I was expecting this. The "Welcome" page helped a lot, there's also plenty of documentation. Finally it's easy to understand the possibilities when you set up a repository and begin testing everything.
The problem I see is with new users who aren't supposed to be admins, but rather just users. Within my team we probably won't use Differential, but rather go with Diffusion and do post-commit audits. However the menu item for Differential will stay at the top of the application list until a new user himself removes it in his own settings. The other way around for Paste, which we'll probably use a lot, but which is buried within a list of ~50 more or less useful applications. These things will affect user acceptance, and I'll have to provide some good arguments to get things going if I want to make a push for using Phabricator in my company.
I think the idea of having configurable UI presets like discussed in T4103 is the solution that is needed for this problem. I'm glad that this issue is getting adressed.
Sorry for hijacking this discussion a bit, but I thought it fits the context.
Yeah, we know it's kinda bad nux. There is an overarching task in T10032 to make each new application state richer. And the general admin experience better with T9303.
One thing we do differently is each user has their own view by default (ie, their work), vs something like GitHub where you're seeing a global state.