software-store-developers team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Matthew McGowan wrote on 19/06/11 10:48:
>...
> Are the changes proposed arbitrary or are they based on user testing
> evidence or other?  This is not clear and i think the reasons need to
> be made more explicit.  It's a lot of effort to rearrange the UI and
> we should be as clinical as possible...
> 
> I really think we should make explicit UI issues users are having and
> work from there.  Currently what issues do the mockups deal with in a
> satisfactory manner?  The UI is subjective territory but nevertheless
> we should work from some evidence and issues.

You make a good point that we shouldn't rearrange things just for fun.
However, the existing arrangement isn't based on user testing evidence
either. We have done user testing of USC, but it hasn't revealed
anything specific in this area. This is just an experiment to see if we
can design something that is obviously better. Maybe there isn't
anything obviously better.

> For instance why is so much importance being placed on Version,
> License and Total Size? The position proposed in  p59-small creates a
> large amount of empty space in the left hand margin and for what
> gained value? How much does the average user gain from knowing these
> particulars?  Of these details, in my personal usage all i really
> would be interested in is the download size, and only then if i was on
> a restricted/slow internet connection. On a high bandwidth connection,
> however, i would only care about this stuff when i actually selected a
> package to intsall, and even in this scenario it's merely academic.

I was aiming for the opposite -- placing less importance on that
information by getting it out of the main column, and probably using
smaller print too. Perhaps you can think of alternative ways to do this?
Smaller print might be enough by itself.

> On the otherhand we are suggesting truncating the app description
> initially... not sure this is wise but this is based on my gut
> instinct only. Is there evidence to suggest this is best?  The user
> can have the app description, the only truely comprehensible
> information about the app, available in full before anything else.
> Why artificially limit this? We have the description in its totality
> on the hard-drive, there is no real latency issues we have to deal
> with... we need to be careful how we decide upon limiting otherwise
> immediate information.

My only motivation in trying this was to have bigger screenshots (and
therefore less need to magnify them) without requiring more scrolling to
see them. For some applications (particularly games), the
interestingness of the screenshot rivals the interestingness of the
descriptions.

> Personally i think the item-view is not terribly wrong, but to improve
> it the big challenge is dealing with what information should be
> contextual and what should be static, which buttons/links/data are
> necessary all of the time and what is necessary in specific
> circumstances. 
>...

Do you have some examples of this?

Cheers
- -- 
mpt
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