(Draft)
The V3 is a user interface element. Therefore it has direct impact in the user experience. It is also a powerful software with an extensive number of features. This richness, if not well proposed, can definitely be hostile to the end user, forced to deal with a bloated and difficult to use interface.
Our usability goals are:
- Learnability: it must be easy to learn.
- Efficiency: quick and easy to perform tasks.
- Memorabilty: once learned, it should be easy to use it again.
- Reliable: users must feel secure to work and play with it.
- Enjoyable: people must just love it.
Design
The interface graphical design impacts on many aspects of usability. It can definitely push people to do their job better and more efficiently.
Other than giving pleasure, the interface quality can change the way end users percept the software. They can feel it as not reliable, if it looks like an old style things. At the same time, they will assume the software is good and reliable if facing a modern and easy to use interface, even without looking at the effective features, performance and robustness of the code.
An important thing to keep in mind is that we are offering a text processor. Many of our end users (most of them), have already used such applications in their desktop and are, at different degrees, used to them. We should therefore come with a solution that is friendly and quickly recognizable, possibly resembling existing applications, reducing the learning curve.
UI Elements
- Elements organization: we must completely review the interface organization. The following factions must be considered during our analysis:
- Critical features
- Important features
- Frequency
- UI logger: one idea is developing a UI logger that sends UI usage statistics to a DB in the server. Potential data to be logged embraces toolbar buttons, toolbar combos options, dialogs and their fields. This logger could be implemented for FCKeditor 2, so we could use its data for V3.
Performance
Usability is all about user satisfaction. Performance, especially bad performance, has a decisive impact in this satisfaction.
During the development of V3, we'll be constantly focused on providing the best performance in our editor. The editor must load quickly, and it must be responsive to user actions.
Features
[ TODO: List some of the most important usability related features ]