Neos UI Improvement Suggestions

Creating Neos & Flow Design & UX
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Hey everybody,

I’ve recently been in contact with Jens Hoffmann in the last months; we’ve seen each other on two Frankfurt Neos Meetups, one of which were even organized at his company :slight_smile:

During the meetups, he also got in touch with Neos again after quite a while – and he has asked if it would be of help if he’d write together his suggestions|experiences|thoughts on the Neos UI. I replied to him that it would be awesome to collect his feedback!

He just sent me his feedback so far. I personally think it’s a great collection of things we can improve UI-wise.

I feel the suggestions fall into four categories:

  • 30% are very low-hanging fruit, we can even still change in the existing Ember-based backend.
  • 30% are related to other modules than the content modules; so we can directly fix these.
  • 20% we might directly be able to change during the React rewrite
  • 10-20% are debatable or are things where discussions are usefull :slight_smile:

The suggestions

Before reading the suggestions, please remember that they are just meant in a constructive way. I personally think they are written in a very good and non-harmful way :wink:

The suggestions have been collected on http://invisionapp.com so far. You can either look at them by checking out the PDF snapshot attached here, or you can go to https://invis.io/MB8O9R0YS (make sure you enable comments at the bottom right).

However, the most efficient way to read all the comments is by letting me know about your Invisionapp Account Email; then I can add you to the collaborators list - and then you can add further comments. If you do this, please don’t delete comments, and if you resolve comments, please reply to them what the intention was :slight_smile:

So far, the texts/suggestions are only in German, but all responses should be in English.

Next Steps

During the next week (because I’m on holidays for 2 weeks afterwards), I’d like to form an interested-group-of-people to go through the list, discuss the topics when needed, and create some Github issues and|or direct fixes for them.

I’d suggest that we meet in #guild-ux on Slack. If you would like to join this group, let us know here or on slack!

Finishing Thoughts

Thanks Jens for your efforts so far, I personally think they are very helpful :slight_smile:

All the best,
Sebastian

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Comments are in German :cold_sweat:

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Yes I know. Sorry for that; still I think it’s a great effort by Jens and I didn’t want to wait sharing it with you. We’ll translate them as quickly as possible!

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yes, very helpful indeed. Thanks Jens!

In general, I’d like to make a UX meeting / sprint happen beginning of next year. It would be good if we went one step back and looked at Neos from a wider angle, discuss the user interface but also other parts of the user experience.

I have some ideas spinning in my head, which for example include onboarding, administration and some typical workflows. And I bet most of you have some ideas, too.

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Thank you, Jens, those are really some useful comments!
@sebastian if you grant access I’ll translate the comments

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FYI: I went through all the comments and tried to translate them (cc @dimaip).

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Hey very cool! Thanks a lot for the feedback Jens. Good suggestions. Tried to answer the questions.

There are some comments on things that have changed (outdated version?) and some that are addressed by existing pull requests.

And some of the things addressed in the proposals from Christoph Ono https://jira.neos.io/browse/NEOS-1173, but are yet to be implemented.

In general the UI has come about in a ad-hoc sort of way, so there are just things that is inconsistent and never been thought through and streamlined. It’s been a lot of improvements here and there.

Also there are quite some comments on things that go into the category of not “would be nice”, but never addressed as other things are prioritized before them or not itching enough :stuck_out_tongue: Not to say that those things shouldn’t be improved, but someone needs to spend time on them :slight_smile:

Opening tickets would be awesome @sebastian!

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Awesome, start to comment a bit will continue in the next few days, but good to see UI on the discussion table again …

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I commented and translated all 39 comments I marked as resolved earlier today. Reopened one comment that might be interesting for the react rewrite.

Only very few (one or two I think) where unclear and will be reopened if the additional information should point to a problem with the current UI (or provide inspiration for the new UI).

Be aware that you need to click the check box to see “resolved” comments, but I think it’s better for the overview if we “resolve” comments as we go, so we can prioritize and create GitHub issues for comments that are left “unresolved” in the end.

Thanks a lot to Jens from my site as well for the massive amount of feedback!

Also great to see so much activity on this topic and on the prototype itself.

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I noticed that resolved comments are automatically set to “unresolved” when commenting on them (did not notice that on friday evening).

General workflow question: Where will we decide which comments we are going to turn into GitHub issues?

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Hi,

really good feedback, thx Jens and @sebastian !

I also would be interested in finding a good workflow.
Because it doesn’t make sense to fix stuff which would then maybe forgotten in the rewrite,
so it must be fixed in both, or only in the rewrite.
I don’t know much yet about the possibilities of labeling and grouping issues in Github.

As Sebastian said, for the non-content tasks we could directly create issues and discuss these already.

Do we actually want to keep the “Package Management” Module btw? I’ve never ever used it and it’s actually dangerous imho. But that’s maybe a separate discussion :wink:

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