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Usability Issues

0. Introduction

This page is to focus on broader areas of Sophie 2 functionality which impact product usability; this page is purposefully not focused on the level of individual tasks. I've focused on several major sections of Sophie's functionality and added use cases to make it clear how these issues will appear in the real world. This page will be expanded as usability testing begins.

1. Timelines

Timelines exist, though much functionality (using them in conjunction with links, audio, and video) is currently missing. How timelines work across pages (how a user would construct slideshows) is still a big shadowy.

Importance = high.

(See Steve's page here.)

1.1. Time-based media on a page

Audio and video can currently be put on a page, but fine controls are still missing.

(usecase: people want to put a video or audio file on a page and have it work without messing with timelines more than they have to.)

1.2. Slideshows

(usecase: people have a bunch of pictures which they want to have on sequential pages; while the pages turn, there's audio. More complicated version: same thing, but with video that goes through the pages rather than audio (the video section of the Mozart book).)

2. Page templates

Importance = high. These still don't work in any reasonable way.

Related issues: copying/pasting frames; shared frame/shared content problem.

Does locking content help things? Can this be made comprehensible?

Current implementation

While there is some page template functionality, it's not in its final state, and it's hard to gauge how well it will work. Another problem is the lack of flows.

3. Frames and flows

Importance = high.

This is essentially the problem of basic users wanting to use text that spans pages. We can currently link text between text frames, but not across pages.

Possibly immense related problems: interaction between frames flowing across pages and page templates; autocreation & autodeletion of pages.

Current implementation

Right now we don't have a way to use flows across pages.

Use case 1: standard book with single flow frame

(How do we instruct people how to do this? Do they set the page up, then insert the text? What if they insert the text, then set up the page, then want subsequent pages to use that layout?)

Use case 2: book with parallel flow frames

Use case 3: book with several flows in series

Chaptering: does this merit a separate section? Obviously not going to be in there, but it is something people are going to want in some form.

4. Sophie Server integration

Importance = medium.

There's currently no way to upload a book to Sophie Server from inside of Sophie (or from the web application) which limits its usefulness.

5. Book templates

Problem in Sophie 1: because of limited functionality (no links, no timelines, no page templates) book templates were rarely used.

Shift's UI proposal for new books suggested a method for bringing the book templates upfront; this would be a better way to implement them than the dragging from the palette to the workspace.

(how important are these?)

Current implementation

We have book templates, but they can't actually be used.

6. Anchoring

Importance = medium. Anchoring is connecting a frame to a flow in text: so if you have Figure 1, you want Figure 1 to be near the place in the text that references Figure 1, even if you insert text before that, moving Figure 1 back a few pages.

Current implementation

None: no flows mean no anchoring.

7. Show/hide issues

(do we need to dig this up again?)

connected to: timelines, page structure palette

8. Text styles

Currently: confusion between character & paragraph application. This needs to be separated out; we have no current paragraph or character styles.

9. Bug reporting

(See my user bug tracking page. This is okay now.

10. Resource handling

(basically: dealing with large numbers of resources in a book; sorting, filtering; importing everything at once. If we don't have drag and drop, this could become an issue to solve.)

11. Comment frames

Comment frames became an enormous part of the justification for Sophie 1; they have not yet been implemented in Sophie 2.

Integration with Sophie server?

Current implementation

None.

12. Embedded books

Problem in Sophie 1: confusion between embedded books on the page of other books and opening in their own window; confusion between embedded books that were part of the container book's file structure and those that were linked. UI needed to be much clearer.

(in demos this is looking much better - small buttons for page turning.)

Embedded books also require a much clearer sense of structure: a tree diagram somewhere (books palette?) should tell you what's embedded in what.

Current implementation

Can import embedded book via Insert > Book menu item. This is a better way of embedding a book than the old drag method.

Embedded books palette should display embedded books but does not.

Embedded books seem like they're going to be very slow for large books.

13. Sophie Reader and annotations

Current Implementation

The current state of the reader app is relatively good: it does what it's supposed to. Annotations mostly aren't working yet, or at least I can't get them to work. Sophie Server integration is there, but comment frames are not.

14. Publishing

(where is this in the schedule?)

15. Long books

Long books came close to derailing Sophie 1 development. Subcases:

• Books that contain a huge amount of content (100 Mb, 250 Mb, 500 Mb, 1 Gb)
• Books that contain a huge number of pages
• Books that contain a huge number of pages with flowing text
• Books that contain pages with a very large number of objects on them (this seems especially important w/ the new timeline model)

Comments

We need a collection of Sophie 1 timeline usecases so we can go through how those will be handled in Sophie 2.