[toolpunk]

While designing new skin mockups I realized how complicated a lot of dialogs and menus are. While I understand it's great to have all those powerful features and a lot of people on this forum use them daily, I believe they should be hidden by default.

Maybe the settings level variable's scope could be expanded to cover this. As a case in point, let's take a quick look at the "Set Content" Dialog.



First you got to choose the content, then select a scraper and finally deal with some options. Some of which might not even be clear to the common user in their purpose. I suppose the average user sets the directory content, is happy with whatever happens to be the first scraper in the list and doesn't even bother with the advanced options.

Thus I suggest defining sane defaults for this, e.g. recursive scanning with Universal Movie Scraper and hiding these elements from the user unless he explicitly set the settings flag to an advanced level. The same could be done for other dialogs.

Don't get me wrong I love XBMC / Kodi for its customizability, but obviously it is a barrier to less tech-savvy users. "Dumbing down" the default user interface should help those people and greatly increase the WAF.

[Ned Scott]

I like the idea. I imagine something like an easy selection of buttons, like "This contains..." then a button for each "movies, TV shows, music videos". Then a little description of what files it will look for. The description will say "if your files are set up differently, please look at the advanced options" with a button for the additional settings. The final button will be "update library" or "scan" or something.

[phil65]

I like the idea. I imagine something like an easy selection of buttons, like "This contains..." then a button for each "movies, TV shows, music videos". Then a little description of what files it will look for. The description will say "if your files are set up differently, please look at the advanced options" with a button for the additional settings. The final button will be "update library" or "scan" or something.

sounds good. Solving stuff with very simple dialogs would also allow us to reduce the number of dialogs skinners have to create in the long term because simpler dialogs can more easily get merged.

[da-anda]

+1

[phil65]

to add to that, we should try to keep it in a way that we do not mix horizontal and vertical button lists. it´s much more convenient to navigate when all lists have same orientation. another option would be to do more stuff on a step-by-step way. (--> First dialog "Choose Content", second dialog "Choose Scraper", third dialog with some summary + "Scan","Advanced" and "Cancel" buttons for example) That would also lead to a lot of simple dialogs instead of the complicated ones used today.

[toolpunk]

Splitting the dialogs would definitely allow for cleaner design but I'm afraid it wouldn't necessarily result in an easier user experience. For instance I truly believe a large number of (potential) users don't even know what a scraper is, so I'd rather not ask them which one to use.

[da-anda]

in terms of enduser usability there are loads of things that could be improved. Hopefully we can fix/improve a lot of this stuff with the planned new skin for Kodi which has a strong focus on usability and hopefully won't be bound to the current limitations of Kodi but rather Kodi will be changed to make the concept possible. But let's see how this turns out.

[phil65]

Splitting the dialogs would definitely allow for cleaner design but I'm afraid it wouldn't necessarily result in an easier user experience. For instance I truly believe a large number of (potential) users don't even know what a scraper is, so I'd rather not ask them which one to use.

I wouldn´t mind if choosing scraper would also move to the new "Advanced" dialog. I´m talkin about a general approach, not about those small details.

[topfs2]

Personally I kindof hate the step by step stuff, in general I really dislike wizards
If we need multiple steps I'd much prefer something were we don't leave the window/dialog but have "tabs"

Hopefully we could find a way to combine source creation and the content setting into one dialog as they are very connected. And it would be much more clear when you want to go back and edit it (no need to have both edit content and edit source).

I think changing the dialogs would be very feasible from a core standpoint, its mostly swapping it around and not changing much in our internal handling anyways.
So a mockup, if you were completely unrestricted, of what you'd' like to do might help quite a bit.

Might be worth it to consider Montellese's media importing work into this also.

Personally I think something along the lines of the current add media source but with a content list underneath, some inspiration
http://images.maketecheasier.com/2010/02...source.jpg
http://images.macworld.com/images/howto/...iginal.jpg

but I'm no artist and maybe thats hard to cram into one dialog

[Martijn]

what topfs2 is suggesting makes way more sense (screenshots)

[phil65]

@topfs2:
I´m also not the greatest fan of wizards, it´s just a suggestion what we can do to simplify user interface and, in addition, save the skinners some work because I can´t see any other way to reduce the number of required dialogs significantly. my preferred option would still be, as I said, to move some advanced stuff out to another dialog.
the main thing we have to get rid of is the mixing of different control types with different orientations. (example: placing buttons on top and beneath a vertical list, like on the screenshot in OP, is crap in terms of navigation because we have no idea how many items that list has)
The FireTV UI solves lot of stuff pretty good in that aspect I think, they almost exclusively use horizontal lists throughout the skin, no matter if the list contains media content or settings.

@Martijn
explaining your opinion would be nice just sayin "that makes way more sense" does not really help to find a proper solution.

[Martijn]

hiding option away doesn't make much sense. simplifying the options does. i found the screenshots quite self explanatory. maybe have a button on it to choose scraper that pops up the list for selection of preferred scraper

[phil65]

yeah but you cannot "simplify" scraper selection any further than putting all scrapers into a list. and that list has to be put somewhere in the UI. I just say that this list should not get mixed with too many other controls into one dialog because a remote-optimized UI simply does not allow that.
Idea for that specific dialog: Put Scraper selection into a seperate dialog and only show the button for scraper selection when more than one scraper is installed. (that way only people who deal with downloading several scrapers would see that list at some point)

[Martijn]

that's what i said

[phil65]

then i probably misunderstood something