Journal Project View - User Testing

Recently, Abhijit Patel got a major part of his GSoC project merged! We merged the Journal project view!

I was very excited by this, and I decided to do what you do when you have something that is exciting - share it. I found some friends of mine to join in in a very informal "user test" for the software. They were presented with the main journal screen and then asked to do the following tasks:

1. Create a new project
2. Add a new entry to that project

So pretty simple right? It went pretty well on the whole, but here is the feedback that I got from them:

• The UI for adding a project and adding a new entry was very self explanatory
• One participant found the add button behaviour confusing. He clicked it many times, because they didn't see any activity on the screen.
  • Maybe it would be best to clear the entry when the user clicks it?
• All participants found it hard to find the projects view
  • Maybe we need to show a popup to users explaining the new project feature, so that they know to click the project list view icon
• One of the participants found a bug that the project icon was incorrect in the list view. It was the 'document-generic' icon rather than the project box icon.

So those are things that I'm sure we will improve before 0.110!

But in the long shot, there are wider things to improve. All the users that I tested with found the frame quite confusing. They would accidentally invoke the frame when the moved the mouse to the corner. But they were very confused about how to close it. They tried clicking on the activity, but that didn't help them. Maybe we need to reconsider the frame design?