UI Improvements

[rastersize]

Possible improvements to increase user experience. Collect stuff here so we don't forget about it.

Bugs

Everything in UI that obviously shouldn't be like this. Most of them must be fixed

Optical

• Cells in Questions View don't align with height of content. Espacially tags may extend to next cell.
• Bio in Users view does not correctly align with content
• Body / Tag cell in Single Question View doesn't align with height of content, may result in clipping or overboarding
• Wrong gravatars displayed while scrolling in User search view
  • Most likely caused by the network operation finishing after the cell has been reused for a new “user”. Can most likely be solved by cancelling the operation when the cell is removed from view (perhaps in tableView:didEndDisplayingCell:forRowAtIndexPath:).
• URL in User search preview cells may intersect with upvote label
• Some post bodys don't get rendered (displaying Loading…) UIWebView fails to render post body #28

Navigational

• [ ] Tapping on Tags in Questions View mistakly opens the question
• Some comments scroll on their own (When to use volatile to counteract compiler optimizations in C# > 3rd comment on Question)
• No way to get back to own profile after tapping on questions in My Profile Tab. Same for every profile in Users Tab.
• Tapping on Questions in a User profile takes shitload of time and doesn't seem to work.
• Can’t tap on the “Questions” row on “My Profile” tab (it’s hidden under the navigation bar).

Not finished

Missing or incomplete data. Interfaces that look unfinished. Missing connections between views. Should be finished or

Optical

• Up / Downvote in content
• Background in Questions View
• The whole Singe Question View (unclear what data means)
  • No accepted answer mark in Single Question View
  • No date / time of question
  • Headers for answers are pretty empty. Maybe remove it?
• Date / Time in comments always show 07-12-2011 00:00 (Please refer to the database: 90% of comments have this date)
• Gravatar in User Profile View overboards rounded corner
• Few result in User search list lead to empty user preview cells.

Inconsitency

UI Stuff that is solved differently throughout the app. One solution should be used unless there are reasons for doing it differently

Optical

• Gravatars are sometimes with gloss
• Comments View does not display Title. Comments would be consistent
• HTML content from the database is rendered differntly in the app
• Different representations of Tags

Navigational

• Tapping on gravatar does not always open the users profile
• It should be discussed, what happens if a user navigates from one kind of view to another without using the tab bar. Does the tab change? Does tapping on a tab result in a fresh root view? Can users navigate recursivly into infinity or should the be thrown back?

Improvements

Could be implemented but is not necessary. Maybe a matter of taste

Optical

• Keep search field while scrolling
  • Disagree, default behavior is to hide it for screen space. I'd stick to iOS defaults in this case.
• Cache Gravatars
  • Nice idea but imho completely nuts, we're already the only group to load those things.
• Adapt font of UIWebViews to regular font to make harder to spot, that it is rendered HTML
• Accepted answer icon is pretty small

Navigational

• Remove Keyboards in List View if user starts to scroll
  • for profile-search-view
• In Questions View search: Manual opening of [ or @ should start tag suggestion mode aswell. Same for closing.
• Tapping on accepted answer mark directly navigates to the accepted answer

[rastersize]

I started creating some mockups the other day in order for us to achieve a more unified look and feel as well as get more “final” graphics assets. You can get the Photoshop files in the opfo/resources/mockups repo/directory.

Comments, tweak, ideas and so on are extremely welcome. I would like to stress that I do not want to dictate that the app should look like this, it should be seen as a suggestion on it could look. 😃

Latest exports

As of writing the most recent mockups look like this.

Questions view (plural)

The colored part on the right could be directly correlated to the “heat” map thing.

Yes it does not show tags, I am aware of this and are working on trying to incorporate them. Unfortunately they did not fit naturally in the above design imo.

Question view (singular)

The question view also has three different headers matching the “heat” map thing (image on the right hand side).

[tdeekens]

Tag-Browser mockup

Here is a quick mockup as promised for the Tag-Browser as I currently am envisioning it.

Please note the following

• Tags are always ordered by occurrence no matter at what level
• A tag bubblies size could indicate its relative value (% of all occurrences of all currently viewed tags combined)
• The breadcrumb shows the "path" taken and acts as a clickable back button for each crumb updating the viewed tags again
• Tapping on a tag will get you to the next "deeper" level by just searching for connected tags for just tapped on one
• Double tapping will add a tag to the search bar and perform a search to indicate how many questions are actually in the database with the current set of tags in the search bar