ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Bruno Girin <brunogirin@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 23/02/13 21:17, Dalius wrote:
> Hi, all,
>
> I'm one of developers volunterring on one of Ubuntu Phone Core apps:
> Calculator
>
> Here is our first demo:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yb0blrXyN8
>
> We would like to hear your opinions about what you see, what can be
> improved (especially from design side as we are not designers) and etc.

Very nice! Here are a few comments in no particular order.

As mentioned in the comments, the way the = sign works is likely to
confuse people. I'm not sure renaming it M+ would reduce the confusion
because users will be looking for an = sign.

The fact that you can scroll back to see previous results is not easily
discoverable as the animation that pushes the previous result up is
rather fast. Some visual hint that you can scroll back through previous
results would be good.

Similarly, the fact that you can scroll the keyboard to get to more
functions is not easily discoverable.

The "syntax error" message is not very user friendly: it seems to appear
when the expression is incomplete and you can't calculate a final result
so maybe a special symbol (e.g. a question mark) for that case would
work better?

There are instances where the result is shown as "nan": non-technical
users will not understand what this means. As this result occurs in
cases of incomplete expression, it should be treated the same as above
with the special "incomplete expression" symbol.

Finally, I would render the C and backspace keys in different colours to
highlight that they do something special compared to the others. And
possibly move them to the right as this is where they tend to be on
physical calculators (i.e. swap them with the parentheses).

Cheers,

Bruno