djp's UI mockups redux: discussion

[linuxcaffe]

Hey there, David here again! I heard rumblings of UI rethinking, and I've done a lot of thinking about that too. As I may have bragged here before, I'm the original Designer of taskwarrior, and earned Design credit on related projects taskwiki, taskopen, taskwarrior.vim and others. I came up with most of tasks core features and functions, and brilliant coder Paul Beckingham made it happen in c++. Anyways, that was long ago and doesn't give me authority to tell anybody what to do with their android app, I know, we do this sort of thing for fun. What authority it DOES give me, is as one of the most taskwarrior and taskwarrior ecosystem obsessed individuals on the planet!!

So like the rest of us, I would really like a good taskwarrior mobile app, and it would ideally support as much core taskwarrior functionality as possible, while being quick and intuitive to use! Just like task at the cli, some people are perfectly happy with the simplest functions, and other just have to dig into all of the crazy crap task can do.

Back to UI;
I have been submitting mockups to issues here, with answers to questions, and I think I've cooked up a UI that could perform a LOT of taskwarrior functionality, without too much confusing detail. The design goal was to present easy access to as much of the existing task data as possible, while reducing visual "non-information" (like Not Selected) and control handles for a lot of it. Allow me to propose this pile of mockups. I don't care too much about theming, as long as it doesn't co overboard with the padding. But I digress! Here's the current thinking;

Task Add dialog

Task Info and Edit

Task Reports

Filter

Report and Sort connection

List with more complex sorting

Please give these a close look, there's a lot going on under the hood!
Feedback?

[Sanat-Jha]

Hey @linuxcaffe, from what I can understand from the mockups, in the sorting section you’re displaying “+” and “–” symbols along with Asc/Dec text highlights to indicate the order. From a user’s perspective, I see the following issues:

The “+” and “–” symbols are not self-explanatory and would require trial and error to understand their meaning and order.

Displaying both Asc/Dec text highlights and “+ / –” symbols feels redundant, as they convey the same information.

The Asc/Dec texts appear like buttons, but as far as I can tell, they are not clickable and only indicate the current state.

Most importantly, this approach requires a lot of clicks to achieve the desired sorting order.

Personally, I prefer minimizing the number of clicks as much as possible. To address this, I’ve raised a separate issue discussing improvements to the sorting and filtering design. I’d appreciate your thoughts on that: #555.

[linuxcaffe]

IMHO the best sorting model here is in the last mock-up

[linuxcaffe]

For a taskwarrior user + and - are how sort orders are defined