Forum OpenACS Development: Re: .LRN user interface design

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Posted by Lars Pind on
There's only going to be one color/gif for the message at this point.

You're right, it does connotate error more than confirmation, currently.

Just for background, this current redesign is co-funded by MIT and Collaboraid, and the funds are quite limited.

/Lars

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Posted by Bruno Mattarollo on
Fair enough, but since you asked for feedback :)

Should be quite easy to have different message categories rendered differently with CSS right? even the image. Not for this round but for the future.

I am really happy to see this change, it's quite badly needed (yes, we always complain that the look is not as important as the underlying architecture but many decision makers are convinced more by the looks, like it or not).

/B

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Posted by Jeff Davis on
Bruno, currently there is nothing stored for the message other than the message text itself so no way to tell if it was informational versus a warning.

We would need to change the message stuff to track a message type as well (maybe message, warning, error or something like that) to be able to decide what css class to use.

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Posted by Lars Pind on
Right :)

The multiple icons/colors/message types was actually something we had on our wish-list, along with other things like cooking up a few pre-defined color schemes, or going more deeply into the applications.

So we've had to do everything we could to limit scope. Specifically, we've stuck to just 3 pages: My Space, a list-builder page, and a form-builder page (both taken from file-storage, but that's not terribly important). And we've limited ourselves to one version of everything. And no deep IA changes, or application pages.

So brainstorming about what we could also do is helpful for future reference, if anyone should find the funding/time to continue the work at any point in the future.

Right now, the most valuable input would be ways to simplify what we have ...

/Lars

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Björn and myself are planning to enhance the message system to allow sending messages to users from outside the users session (e.g. "you got mail"). We could add a type to the procedure as well, which would display the message with an "id" of "message_$type" (e.g. "message_warning"). But I'm not so sure about the powers of CSS. Would it be possible to choose a different icon and colors based on the "div class id", defined in a .css file ?
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Posted by Lars Pind on
I think that, for IA purposes, we should consider putting "You got mail" type messages somewhere other than this message bar.

The message bar is for direct feedback on the action the user just took. There's a causal relationship. You do something, then you see the message which confirms that you did something.

I'm afraid we'll be confusing matters if we use that same location/shape/color for other purposes.

What do other people think?

/Lars