Saturday, March 2, 2013

Working on the UI

Trying to keep the UI as simple and uncluttered as possible,  I have chosen to go with a design, where the running exercise (WebApp) is using the whole screen without any border, etc.

The only visible additions are the 2 (currently) tabs in the bottom of the screen.  One brings up the exercise overview and the other the settings panel.



Exercises are blueprints


The design chosen for the exercises themselves is done as if everything is an animated blueprint.  This was done to 
  1. Make sure that the information in each exercise is always easy to find (e.g. no fancy colors distracting everywhere - unless the exercise is about distracting fancy colors ;)) - and
  2. To keep the design simple for the students to be able to - fairly quickly - come up with their own applications to share, without the need to be experts in Gimp or Photoshop.
The application is made with Qt5/QML with some C++ mixed in, where needed.  This results in a smooth UI experience - even on RaspberryPi*

The panels




When clicking one of the tabs in the bottom, the respective panel appears to reveal a semi-transparent overlay with very simple functionality.

NOTE:  This is NOT the final design - I've left that for my graphics design buddies to help me with.

The exercise panel has three sections:


  1. An exercise class filter (symbols representing chemistry, history, mathematics, etc.) to be used for fast filtering.  E.g. when a chemistry teacher wants to select among the exercises that link to chemistry, a simple click on the filter will remove all other apps from the list.
  2. The actual list of exercises.  This is done as a scrollable (QML ListView) list of exercise applications, where each one has a title, an icon and up to 4 category markers (the same as the filters above)
  3. Deeper information about the app that is selected or hovered with the mouse.

The settings panel currently has a few buttons - but will be extended with more juicy stuff.

One of the more relevant things already working though, is the ability to change language on the fly inside the client:

Selecting "English"

Selecting "Español"

What's missing?


I'd love to hear your input! - but please be nice... IANAGD!**

Some things I know I want to include:
  • A way for students to do a simple login before performing an exercise (for feedback to the teacher)
  • A way for students to see their results
  • An exercise cloning tool and a simple exercise creator, allowing students to make their own exercises and share them with others, when the device is online.



* NOTE:  Sometimes, WebKit brings the RaspberryPi to it's knees, which is not the fault of QML.  I am working on ironing out the performance issues in the QtWebKit source and the exercises (WebApps) themselves so the final product will run like a charm (hopefully).

** I am not a graphics designer ;)

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