Quick Post looks unnecessarily scary

[lure23]

This is the second part of my suggestions on how to improve the Fusion 360 / Sim 360 Home UI.

The idea behind a Quick Post is nice, but now it looks rather uninviting and complex. 

The order of the icons is arbitrary - or thought to resemble the frequency of their actual usage (which is always a guess, unless they adapt to the user's actual use, which again shakes things by making what seems to him as arbitrary changes in the UI). Well.. we can easily make this more peaceful.

For the first, it would be beneficial to get rid of the artificial 'More' category, and instead group similar tools next to each other.

Message

Link

Event

These are the simplest entries. All data is entered in browser input fields. 

File

Photo

Video

Presentation

These are all upload entries. Can actually be merged into just one 'Upload' entry.

Poll

Quiz

Survey

Different kind of questions.

Blog post

Wiki page

The last ones open a full edit page (blog or wiki). They are more elaborate than the other 'Quick Post' actions and deserve to be last (like they currently are).

At least three types of UI groupings come to my mind.

Suggestion A

Make each group's common-most entry represent the group, as currently happens if i.e. 'Photo' is selected from below 'More..'.

This looks peaceful, doesn't it.

Clicking the 'Message' tab brings up a menu (similar to the current behaviour if 'Photo' is selected as a tab) of the other entries in that group.

Event could well be set as a 'group' all of its own. I'm just bringing up ideas on how to make the UI simpler to the user.

As to the File (Photo, Video, Presentation) group, cannot they be all the same?

Photo and Video at least are just the same thing. Analyze the uploaded file contents and decide based on that. No need to separate them in the UI.

Presentation could probably be dealt with in the same way (= automatic analysis). 

( Btw, I'm impressed by the quality of i.e. PDF handling. Normally, I'm of the "one tool for one thing only" mind set (i.e. SlideShare for presentations) but these are so essential in CAD workflow, it really deserves to be nicely integrated. And it is. )

'Poll (Quiz, Survey)': why doesn't 'Poll' have an additional 'Description' field, like Quiz and Survey.  (minor observation, maybe a bug?)

Suggestion B

Have the 'Quick Post' icon bar collapse horizontally (instead of a menu as above).

This looks a bit unfinished, and may seem weird for some users. On the whole, we're going away from menus, and this would be "menus without menus".

The idea is, hovering on the icon bar would reveal those entries in the particular group. One cannot see all 12 (or so) at a time. One need not to.

There are problems if the widths of the groups differ much. Hovering on 'File' moves 'File' to the left (since the group to its left collapses). The group 'File' represents must span so long that the same cursor position is still covered by it after the swap of groups. This may or may not be a problem.

If selection happens by click (not by hover) there is no such problem. In such a case this is quite the same as the Suggestion A, but the menus are "horizontal" within the icon toolbar (and people would not think of them as menus).

Just an idea.

Thanks for a great tool. I do understand it's in the beginning of its life, and will evolve. Thanks also for actively bringing users into the beta etc. programs at an early stage. For a big company, I am in awe as to how correctly you are doing these things. You smell like a startup!  (and that's a huge compliment!)

[schneik-adsk]

thanks for the though out feedback. We need to talk this over a see what we can do, but these loo like some great suggestions.

[kat.ingalls]

Asko, totally agree that "less is more." We're actually testing this platform internally and I had the same recommendation (with minor differences), modelled off of how Facebook posts are structured. Do you have any UX experience, or is this just from personal insights? Great feedback, thanks!

[lure23]

Thanks, Kat

I have quite a varied background and yes, usability is part of it. However, what I've sometimes noticed in work life is that there's a gap between "usability experts" and what coding actually can do (and/or what users actually value). A balanced team spreads its knowledge across this triangle (simply listening to customers brings out bad results; so does simply listening to usability people).

The main problem with technology is that so little of what we use on a daily basis actually has good usability. I used to have a plan to make "not tested on living humans" stickers I would stick on such devices (can be parking meters, elevators, you name it!). Never did. With this background, you can see that I do appreciate testing Fusion 360 "on living humans".

Nice that you are appreciating the feedback.

[colin.smith]

Archived due to lack of votes.