User Interface Design Ideas

[katestange]

A place to store some user interface design ideas, including example websites.

[katestange]

I've always felt the user experience at this website is a good guide to interacting with a single visualizer. The controls are all at the right in a panel, it "hot modifies" when something changes there, there are presets. Each parameter comes with a brief explanation, sometimes a visual to help, and they are all inviting to play with. Not too complicated. No giant drop-downs.

Plus the visualizer is beautiful: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/the-chaos-game

[katestange]

Also, there's a "randomize" button on the ones that are complicated (like "Exclusions")

[katestange]

Also, I love the simplicity. It's isn't busy.

[gwhitney]

Seems like we may as well keep this issue open as one in our portfolio of "Ideas for aspect X" series (we have ones for visualizers, sequences, etc, etc.) So in that vein, here's another interface/idea question:

The MathML display of Formula sequences is pretty nice. Would it be good to enable/allow MathML display for all Formula parameters? What would the details of that be like? One possibility, if we wanted to get fancy, would be to have the MathML larger in size when you are not editing, and the expression language text format below it in shrunken typeface, but then when you click on the text version the MathML display shrinks (but does not disappear, and live updates) and the text entry gets big. Also I think if we work on this, the text entry/display boxes should support multi-line display, since the formulas can get kind of long and I find editing them gets pretty tricky when you can't see the whole formula.

And while on the topic of editing formulas, some highlight of the matching delimiters would be really helpful.

[gwhitney]

Allow links in the "description" texts associated with parameter input fields.