View Single Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by MattArmstrong View Post
Sounds like action groups are a little "half baked" at the moment (and maybe singleton tasks too) -- i.e. sources of confusion for many. My hope is that this "variety of grouping mechanisms" could be unified into attributes of just one or two as they are not that different from each other, but I'm sure there are many tricky issues, and there is an art to knowing when to ship version 1.0.
I agree that action groups at the moment are a little wonky, but I'm willing to be forgiving at the moment because it is still an alpha. I'm starting to warm to the notion of action groups as opposed to sub-projects on a philosophical level, but I think the UI of OF at the moment is confusing in how it deals with action groups (the fact that I can't find any text anywhere in the application itself that actually says "action group" is the first problem). There's nothing to really indicate to the user what an action group is or how to interact with it. At the very least, I'd like to see the little parallel/sequential button from projects show up for action groups so new users don't have to "discover" the right-click menu to set this attribute. The problem is, where do you put it on a line that's already cluttered with all of the normal action attributes?

And why are there no "action group" specific settings in any of the inspectors? This is the most glaring issue because it's very easy to assume that an action group is a sub-project and try to edit the project attributes in the inspector while selecting the action group which will, of course, not do what you would expect it to do.

Quote:
My original 128k Mac had one mouse button. Gosh darnit, Mac programs shouldn't require you to "option click" on stuff to find out if they do anything interesting. ;-) I do appreciate your pointing it out!
Don't get me started on the one-button mouse debate. Apple's original human factors team dramatically underestimated the average user's ability to adapt to two buttons, and they continue to make the same mistake in the face of a mountain of human interaction studies that contradict the Apple party line. This is not good design anymore, it's just a blind stubborn refusal to change.

What I don't get is why current Apple laptops still ship with only one button when Apple now ships "two-button" (or crappy hateful imitations of two-button) mice, Apple-written software makes generous use of right-click context menus, and the Mac OS has supported multiple buttons for almost two decades. For over a decade now, Apple has made great strides forward in the design of their systems by ignoring the needs of legacy systems. (remember the first floppy-less iMac? or having to buy a USB printer because they dumped parallel ports?). It seems so out of place for Apple to be sticking to their guns on the one issue that everyone seems to agree on -- that multi-button mice are more useful than one-button mice and it's really not as hard as we once thought it was for new users to figure out how to use them.

Quote:
As for not using Life Balance any longer, my answer is similar to Brian's. The simplicity of the outline structure is elegant but the desktop version has a simplistic UI that makes it hard to do things like weekly reviews or manage larger outlines. I stopped carrying a PDA, so the product lost its luster.
Gotcha. Interface issues aside (and all UI issues may be temporary so long as we provide Omni with email feedback), I think the organizing structures of OF are actually pretty simple. Of course, I'm not using folders at all right now. I've got several hundred tasks in there and I'm perfectly content with projects and action groups. If all you use are projects and action groups, I think you can get the functional equivalent of what you describe with LifeBalance.

Quote:
Originally Posted by curt.clifton
I'm somewhat surprised that you've been using the product for weeks and didn't come across how to make an action group parallel. What could be changed to make this more obvious? Is it that changing the parallel status of projects is "in your face" while for action groups it is unexpectedly more subtle? Or is it a problem with lack of documentation? Without a manual yet, I find that reading the forums regularly is very helpful to me in understanding how the product works and different ways of using it.
A general rule of thumb with user interface design is this: Never put anything into a context (right-click) menu that can't be discovered outside of the context menu. Right click menus are convenience features that can make certain frequently performed tasks easier (read: faster) to get to, but they should never ever be the sole place to access any feature. Users should never be expected to have to "scrub" every interface element of a new application just to discover the hidden features that lie in tooltips or within context menus. OF really should provide a more visible UI element (or at the very least, a main menu item) to change the parallel/sequential state of action groups.

But again, I'm fairly forgiving at this point because it's still an alpha.

Last edited by MEP; 2007-08-24 at 09:01 AM..