Improve display calibration and profiling UI
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#77 Improve display calibration and profiling UI
The monitor calibration/profiling UI does need lots of work. At this point it is mostly to expose the basic functionality for testing and development work. But the underlaying functionality is far enough along that it is probably time to go back and rework the UI to make it easier for users to understand how to use the software effectively.
I was contacted by the Open Usability folks a few months back about having someone work with the LProf team on UI usability improvements. But we exchanged a few emails and I have not heard from them again. I will try to re-establsih contact with them to see if perhaps this part of LProf can be as user friendly as possible from the get go.
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Hi. I've been working with the monitor measurement tool in lprof and
thought I'd send my initial newbie reaction in before I become too familiar
with it. Here's what gave me trouble or what I think could be improved. I'm
not trying to imply any "this sucks" comments or declare that something
must change; these are just ideas, opinions, and the result of my own
reactions to using the UI. I'm lobbing them in in case they're useful.
---
I find the present monitor profiler UI very confusing, especially since
there are no WhatsThis annotations or tooltips, nor is the help active.
It's tricky for the user to know what to do and what to expect, especially
since the measurement interface is quite different to that used in tools
like those of GretagMacbeth.
In particular, some explanation of white point vs white level, black point
vs black level would be helpful, along with advice on how to reconcile
white point with black point and white level with black level, if even
possible. The user needs to know what to do here and what to expect, and
not everybody will. I don't, and I know more about colour than most people
who'll be using this, though I'm still on a pretty basic level.
It's also not clear in the UI what role "calibrate" fills as compared to
"measure display", and how the colour meter should be set up for each.
For clarity, perhaps "OK" should probably become "Finish" and move outside
the `select instrument' panel along with Help and Cancel. It might be worth
enabling OK/Finish only when enough data has been collected to generate a
useful profile.
Some hint to the user of the expected flow of work would be very useful in
the calibration dialog, including:
- Disabling any steps that are not yet useful/meaningful in the current
operation panel
- Differentating between "skippable", "required and yet to complete"
and "completed but repeatable" in the current operation panel
- Indicating some flow of work in the current operation panel
- Providing a `next' and `back' button.
I think it'd be useful to move the settings to a separate initial step, and
either lock them or display a summary of them in following steps. Going
back to alter the settings should probably re-flag any completed operations
as yet-to-do. The combination of a radio button list down the left that
requires explicit user movement to change operations with an always-active
settings panel makes it harder for the user to tell what settings apply to
what, need changing when, and what to do next.
The brightness field in the settings need units. Cd/m^2 I assume?
It'd be good to be able to enter a target white point. Maybe some weirdo
wants 5500K or even 9300K ?
`Adopt display WP' should line up with `native display brightness' and
maybe the latter should be renamed to `Adopt native display brightness' and
the former `Adopt native display WP'.
It's not clear to the user what `sample size' is, what it affects, or what
they should do. Even an annotation like (recommended) on the default option
would be useful, especially combined with some tooltips.
`generic' in Gamma might want to become `custom' with a little re-arranging
so that it's more clear that the custom gamma panel is tied to that option.
Alternately, if meaningful, the custom data panel should be updated to
indicate what settings are being used for that preset.
Unknown instruments should probably be hidden in the instrument list by
default, with a checkbox like "show all devices" available to show them.
Their USB bus identifiers should be shown in their names to give the user
some clue what they are / where they are.
That's about it for that dialog. Hope these comments are useful.
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Since this was posted this dialog has been converted into a wizard to help direct the users work flow.
It now has extensive "What's this" information. In addition, many of the pages of the wizard also have additional documentation as part of the dialog to help users understand how this works.
Help for this is still not implemented. Dummy help screens for this are in place as place holders. When these new dialogs mature and start to stabilize the help files will be updated.
Because this is now a wizard the button labels are now:
Help < Back Next > Cancel
and when this is ready to complete the Next > button becomes a Finish button.
The Gamma Value frame is now gray when the Gamma Type is set to anything other than generic. This should eliminate confusion about how these two frames are related.
The unknown instruments in the Select Instrument combo are the machines serial ports. I left these there for development reasons and they will be removed once more testing is done with serial instruments. I am not sure how useful port information is to users for USB ports. One feature that you may not have noticed is that you can connect or disconnect USB devices after the dialog is opened and it will automatically update the list of instruments. Bring it up and unplug your EyeOne and see what happens. Then plug it back in. That will not be possible with serial devices. I do agree that including the port name could be useful to those who have serial instruments. The port information is tracked and available when the Select Instrument combo is filled with items. So this will be easy to add if it is useful to users.
I have started working on making this more state aware but this is fairly complex since at some places in the work flow there can be several valid states. In fact this is true for much of the work flow. In addition the states are display specific. That is the user could do some steps on one display and then move over to another display and this could invalidate the current state depending on what that state was and what the user did on the second display. But it should also be possible for the user to move back to the first display and have the state for that display remain the same as when he/she moved off of it as long as nothing happened while on the other display that invalidated that state. That is the state on the second display may or may not invalidate the state on the first display. But I agree that this dialog does need to be aware of it's current state (IE. what the user has done up to this point) and not be dependent on users understanding this at that level. This may not be of much consequence to users who understand this stuff fairly well but many of LProf's potential users will not be that savvy. But this is non-trivial and I will need to think about this to get it right.
I any case please give the new wizard UI a try and provide more feedback. This was very useful.