I like Evolution. It’s a powerful groupware client. I also like Nautilus, particularly it’s spatial browsing mode. What if my groupware client harnessed the e-d-s framework and galago but presented the data in a spatial manner. Here’s a UI thought. I’d appreciate it if any usability experts could pass comment.
The contacts manager. Features
- easy view of my data,
- easy sharing of my data with friends,
- todays appointments
- predicitve search (stolen from “Address Book Search” applett, as with a lot of this UI),
- viewing of “person objects” or my contacts,
- view who is online (colou picture) or offline (black & white picture).
- If a user is online and you click to contact them, you are automagically presented with an IM view.
- otherwise you get presented with an email client.
- You can easily check if Tux has new music for you to listen to.
I’m not a UI guru. In fact I’m far from it. But I think I’d like to manage my email like this and I’d appreciate UI criticism. I should add that there is no technology demonstrated here that isn’t available in Gnome 2.9.x except for the photos/music sharing. And even that could be easily implemented over IM.
My observations on this are
- This UI may be too busy, can I reduce it’s complexity?
- Is IconView the best container for the “person” icons? I don’t think so. I’d like a left-to-right priority list, so that the most common contact (based on some metric) is pushed to the top of the list.
So there ya go. What do you think?