lewish/asciiflow

Usability Review & Feedback

Opened this issue · 1 comments

porg commented

Foreword

  • First of all, thanks for providing this great web app!
  • Below you will find a compact review and some feedback, most of it pretty self-explanatory.
  • If you'd like to follow up on any of these concretely, feel free to make standalone issues from them.
  • And in those issues feel free to ping me via an at-mention for further input or review if desired.

Very modern ASCII Art paradigms — Great!

  • Elements as vector objects which remain editable/move-able (as opposed to destructive editing)
  • Infinite canvas - On export it is as large as it needs to be to fit all content
  • Local Storage + Nice URLS to local storage - Wow! Nicely done!

Wide variety of export options

  • Various Comment Types to conveniently paste it into the markup/environment of your choice

Great usability

  • Panel in 3 sizes: Closed (as floating action button) > Normal Tool Panel > Tool Panel with Help
  • Dialogs remember the last choices (e.g. Comment Types in Export dialog)
  • Holding down alt showing shortcuts near tools
  • Letter input changes Freeform character. Does that only when Freeform tool is selected to not be in conflict with other tools/modes/shortcuts.

Minor flaws

  • Side panel should have inner scroll: With many files or with help open on small screens it is cut off.
  • File renaming dialog: ESC bound to "Cancel", ENTER should be bound to primary action (Create / Rename).

Bugs

  • Undo (⌘ Z) / Redo (⇧ ⌘ Z) works on Mac in Google Chrome but not in Safari

Usability Improvements

  • Tool shortcuts
    • ALT 1-6 as shortcuts for the tools is not a good mnemonic.
    • Should better be letters corresponding to the tools, idealy compliant with conventions of design apps. I propose the following:
    • alt-R Rectangle - Rectangle is the generic form, square the special form, achieve 1:1 aspect ratio with shift-key down
    • alt-O Oval - Again the name of the generic form, a circle the special form, plus the letter "O" has the shape of an oval too as an additional mnemonic.
    • alt-V is the standard in design apps for the selection tool, V has a pointer/arrow-like shape.
    • alt-F Freefrom
    • alt-A Arrow
    • alt-L Line
    • alt-T Text
  • Pan & Zoom
    • Uses outdated interaction scheme from 1990ies design apps and desktop publishing apps: SPACE to pan, scrollwheel to zoom.
    • On devices with multitouch-trackpads, standard since ca 2010, this would be the more contemporary UX: Two-finger scrolling (on X and Y axis) + pinch-gesture for zooming in/out (Z axis).

Missing features

More geometrical shapes than just boxes

Improvements for existing tools

freealise commented

Scrollbars would be more intuitive; why the current fashion is to hide them altogether?

  • 👍1