Boxes: clarify new box assistant
I find the current new box assistant a bit ambiguous. I think my main issue is not knowing what the different sections are. There's no hint that the items at the top are local .iso files (to be fair, this is in the mockups, but it's a bit faint). It's also a bit hard to know what the second set of options is, I think because of the lack of framing and some of the strings being a bit unclear. (Since this is a collection of slightly disparate options, it's really important that it's obvious what each one is.)
If we add these clarifications, we might end up with something like this:
Another thing we might want to consider is adding featured downloads to the new box dialog. I think that this would be desirable from a downstream perspective. It could be nice to promote the desktop as part of a family of operating systems, in some cases.
That might give us something like this:
In that last example, I've split the "manual" options into two sections, which is possibly clearer. However, the dialog is getting a bit long at this point, which gets me to this:
Advantages and disadvantages:
- Disadvantage: it loses the "box" concept, but that's possibly OK: I don't think users think "I want to create a box". They think: "I want to create a VM" or "I want to connect to remote machine foo".
- Disadvantage: it adds an extra step, with little explanation (we could change the UI to address this, if we think it's an issue).
- Advantage: a VM broker isn't a "box" as such, so semantically it doesn't quite fit into a "new box" dialog. It does fit into "add" though.
I'm thinking that any of these concepts would be an improvement on what we currently have. The last one is probably my favourite.