Usability: New "Create Webpage" dialog

[helmut]

The "Create Webpage" dialog is full of features but for a novice or standard users all these settings are a bit of an overkill.

The current dialog:

Original:



Draft dialog: Concepts & ideas
I have re-designed the "Create Webpage' dialog with the following ideas & concepts on my mind:

- Usage of Standard input 'control', see topic Unified way for creating file list
- Provide a design/template preview to choose a design easily
- Have most important fields that require user input on one page: Output directory, Template, Title, and Header.
- Clear separation of the settings for 'Thumbnails' page and 'Image' page.

Draft #1 - Tab 'Input':


Draft #1 - Tab 'Design':


Draft #1 - Tab 'Thumbnail page':


Draft #1 - Tab 'Overview page':


Draft #1 - Tab 'Output Detail':


Usage of the new dialog
1. Select files in the browser
2. Choose "Create > Web page"
<The above dialog is opened with tab "Design" opened.>
3. The user provides minimal input on tab "Design": Template, page header, page title, and output directory.
<By choosing a specific design settings in the tabs "Thumbnails page" and "Image page" will be (partly) overwritten.>
<For fine-tuning the user can switch to other tab pages and change settings. But no real need to do that because the template has good predefined settings which are loaded when choosing a template.>
4. User presses "OK" to generate Web page

Thus, creation of a webpage will be very simple and easy-to-use.

Please note that in the above draft I have removed the input field "Template folder" because probaly 99,5 % of users will never change this setting. It will be sufficient if power users can change it in the .ini file directly.

Feedback and Comments are welcome!

[loth]

yeah. thats looks good. on the other hand, all dialogues on one window is faster to proceed.
but i like it.
you could add the option to manipulate the images/thumbs with a given script (i.e. saved in the transformation dialogue by the user)

also this feature (keep orientation of thumbnails) is still missing hardly.

the preview is one of the most wanted features. where it must not be an realtime preview, just an image of how it would look like.

also the "output" settings could be a bit for informative. what, if the user don't want an original sub-folder or an extra thumbnail-sub-folder? has the setting to be blank? we know of the problem/things that could happen within xn, when we left a path empty or insert an ./ ...

anyway. nice work. hope it will used the next years...


p.s.
for completion, i'd like to have another optional option like "launch web browser then done":

"go inside the webpage-folder then done" which will tells xn to move to the freshly created website folder and displays those images.

and the good and ol' "close this dialogue, when done" checkbox, so the user can try a lot without closing the dialogue, or, if he knows what he is doing, close the dialogue when done.

[helmut]

With the development of XnView MP, this topic has become important, again.

yeah. thats looks good. on the other hand, all dialogues on one window is faster to proceed.
but i like it.

XnView is intended as a tool for everyone, not just power-users. With a dialog that is not clear you actually loose time because of trial and error and looking for the right option/function. With the above draft the important stuff is separated from the optional stuff, so you can simply leave out the optional stuff like "Outout details".

A short list of your (loth's) suggestions:
- Follow orientation
- Preview (which shows design)
- Better handling of output folders
- "Browse output folder when done" (alternative or in combination with "Launch browser when done"?)
- "Close dialog when done"

[helmut]

Some additional suggestions:

- Each design could have its own defaults. The template designer can specify defaults if he/she wants. These defaults are loaded when loading the design.
- There should be a "save" and "load" for all user settings including the chosen design (files excluded). This way, the creation of a webpage is repeatable.