Mockups And Usage

Mockup

Some ideas for making the UI easier for end users.

Cyan: Make the buttons consistent with other applications (in this case Evolution). It's OK for the users to find several ways to perform the same task. These three buttons allow navigation and also to position back to the current date

Green: Show thumbnails instead of the generic MIME icons. This creates a consistent interface with Nautilus (which generates thumbnails). Very often users remember the appearance of the first page.

Purple: Allow the user to increase and decrease the size of the thumbnails with a slider bar, along with a control-mouse-wheel. This is consistent with PDF Mod, Evolution, Firefox and OpenOffice. If someone edits 4-5 documents a day, they might want to make the images 50 or 75 pixels high in order to get a better look at the first page.

Other Ideas:

• Allow the number of days to increase if the user has a wide or dual screen. Right now the view is locked into 3 days, but with more real estate they might want to see 5
• Allow a setting that lets you combine Saturday and Sunday into a single pane. Business/corporate users very often won't have much activity in this area and this saves a pane; potentially allowing the whole week to appear at one time.
• Make use of the Evolution shots below for other views. List view? Monthly View? The more ways for them to look for data, the greater the chance they will find it.

Using Evolution

Because Evolution has many ways to view calendar data, it was used to display our users "recent documents" from OpenOffice. Two times a day a script does a pass of their .recently-used.xbel files and converts them into an ICS file which is in their "OnTheWeb" tree. This allows them to see their documents in day, list, week, work week and monthly views. What's missing is the ability to see a thumbnail of the document and also the ability to click on it and have it open. Therefore, the activity journal will be a nice upgrade.