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Orion/User Experience

Introduction

This page is a starting point for the direction and evolution of Orion's User Experience.  

From Wikipedia:

User experience (UX) is the way a person feels about using a product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s feelings and thoughts about the system. User experience is dynamic, because it changes over time as the circumstances change.


High Level Use Cases

Definitions of possible user types that Orion can/should help.

User Type Use Case Key needs
Orion Developer or Extender As an Orion platform or plugin developer, I want to be able to use Orion to extend Orion, so that I can quickly and easily test my software as I build it. Hosted site, repositiory connection, code editing
Traditional Web developer As a web developer I want to develop my existing website, or create a new one, hosted on my own server, or my client's server. I want to be able to transfer files to and from that server easily, but edit my files using a web browser on whatever machine I trust, so that I can flexibly connect and create programmed content.  Hosted site and file transfer, site synchronization, code editing
Component builder, page creator As a web component builder I want to quickly create individual styled pages for experimenting or sharing, or build new web components for sharing with others. I want to create these components in isolation, in their own context to focus on them or to try something out.   Hosted site, code editing, repository connection
Cloud based app builder As a cloud based app builder I want to develop HTML5 applications, and sometimes server side components using a web based tool. I want to be able to deploy my apps and components to the cloud hosted software of my choice, flexibly from any browser I trust. Hosted site, code editing, repository connection, cloud vendor connection?
Blog, CMS site builder As a blog or CMS site builder, I want to develop PHP and HTML5 based pages and applications easily using web based tools. I want to be able to edit my files in a more powerful code editor than the bundled content editors that come with the CMS installations, so that I can be faster and more creative with my code. Hosted site and file transfer, site synchronization, code editing



High Level User Needs

Analysis of user needs for some of the top level use cases.

Tribe HTML JS CSS PHP Java Python Dojo jQuery Git S/FTP Specialized FS
Orion Y Y Y N Y N Y N Y N N
Cloud Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
Node Y Y Y N N N N N Y N
Traditional Y Y Y N N N N N Y N
CMS Y Y Y Y N N N N Y N


Feedback from Orion community

Recent review of Orion's User Experience sparked new focus and more stimulous to evolve Orion's User Experience. Announcement of a regular UX meeting resulted in community members emailing the dev list with some of their UX observations. A study of the observations shook out a few common themes. Those observations are depicted below in a mind map.

OrionUX2.png

The items asterixed are items that the Orion team had already begun looking at from a UX standpoint.

These observations provide a bottom up angle on some of the UX areas that matter to users now. The tables in the sections above are an early effort to look at the UX from the high level use cases. Next steps are to look at the high level work flows that stem from the user types, at which point the UX themes can be evaluated in the context of those work flows.

Work items

In 0.5 there is some work progressing on the following themes:

  • Login/Logout
  • Git workflow
  • Consistency/Selection

As part of the process of evolving the UX, it may be worthwhile to tag work items related to the themes above, or a set of agreed themes that make sense - rather than list them individually here?

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