Paperwork 0.2 UX issues
Created by: mjourdan
Hi,
While I had to scan about a dozen of documents, I gave a try to Paperwork and would like to share some thoughts on it's user experience. You'll find in a separate post some ideas to fix the issues listed below.
Ux review
First things first, everytime I launch Paperwork, I'm delighted by it's logo and think "straight and fast, this will light me of a burden". However, Paperwork is not as close to the "scan and forget" philosophy as I hoped, because reaching the scan step requires too much effort and time (see how lazy I am).
In my opinion, controls make user think too much :
- huge number of buttons make feel every actions are equally important. This should be "scan and forget", but it more looks like "scan or modify or print or move or zoom or open a dir and forget"
- document controls (new, edit, delete) are separated from the document list (by a too wide searchbar)
- useless quit button
- the app menu contains actions specific to the current window
- Settings icon and Preferences in the app menu do exactly the same thing but appear twice and under different names
I also think the actual content is drawn in a far too complex layout:
- tabs to switch between labels and pages make think labels are as important as pages
- at a time, the document list shows no more than 2 documents (on a 15" screen)
- 3 columns layout for two kinds of items (documents and pages), so a single page may appear three times at a time (two times as thumbnails in document list and pages list, plus the page itself)
- some empty space at the bottom of the screen look very weird
- huge amount of vertical space lost (up to 7 lines of controls + windows decoration on the labels tabs)
Once she have figured out how the ui works, user will need to find out how to get this stupid scanner working:
- scanner detection requires an extra step on every launch (Hint: open preferences, wait a couple of seconds until a scanner is found, then close the preferences)
Finally, it's pretty easy to get rid of a maximum of paper in a minimum of time. Being able to move pages across documents and marking documents with labels are great features, for example to avoid bothering with scaning the right pages in the right order. Nonetheless, there is plenty of room for improvement.
Regards