[Users] Proposal for a fresh look and feel for Ovirt

[Malini Rao]

Rene, the column widths are not prescriptive in the mockup and the current percentages can be maintained in the new design as well. Reducing information overload is a very valid point but outside the scope of this discussion which is primarily visual. I agree that it contributes to the overall look and feel of the page but is a separate effort from the development point of view. 

Your points on the colors are all noted and we will iterate.

Thanks
Malini

----- Original Message -----
From: "René Koch (ovido)" <r.koch at ovido.at>
To: "Itamar Heim" <iheim at redhat.com>
Cc: users at ovirt.org
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2013 4:21:14 AM
Subject: Re: [Users] Proposal for a fresh look and feel for Ovirt

On Tue, 2013-10-15 at 20:22 -0400, Itamar Heim wrote:
> On 10/15/2013 04:36 AM, Frank Wall wrote:
> > Hi Malini,
> >
> > On 14.10.2013 19:06, Malini Rao wrote:
> >> Here is a proposal for updating the ovirt look and feel to
> >> give it a fresh and modern look - http://www.ovirt.org/Ovirt_LAF.
> >> Your feedback and input is invited.
> >
> > I think your proposal looks way better than the current
> > oVirt interface and I think it would definitively be an improvement.
> >
> > Though I think the oVirt admin interface still looks somewhat
> > bloated. I always thought that it shows too much information
> > at once, but only few of these facts are actually useful.
> >
> > Some columns are useless most of the time. This is especially true
> > if you consider the "Virtual Machines" tab just an overview, not an
> > in-depth view of all VMs. Lets discuss this further:
> >
> > - Display: not interesting if I just want to see the overview
> > - Status: redundant, the icon in the first row already tells me about this
> > - Uptime: not interesting at all, I never used this information for
> > anything
> > - Host, IP, Cluster, Datacenter: Really, why should I care about these
> > details,
> >    if I just want to see an overview of my VMs? If I want to know any of
> > these,
> >    I can click on any VM and see every detail. Or I choose a specific
> > datacenter
> >    or Cluster to see specific details about it.
> >
> > I think this applies to almost every "overview" page in oVirt.
> > It's too much information at once, and even worse, too much useless
> > information.
> >

Rene, the column widths are not prescriptive in the mockup and the current percentages can be maintained in the new design as well. Reducing information overload is a very valid point but outside the scope of this discussion which is primarily visual. I agree that it contributes to the overall look and feel of the page but is a separate effort from the development point of view. 

> > The point is to show only *really* important information first (status,
> > usage),
> > and from this point the user/admin should be able to go deeper and view
> > specific
> > details.
> >
> > Remember, it's just my opinion :-)
> 
> as malini mentioned, this focused on look and feel.
> please open a BZ to track the RFE of allowing to choose which columns to 
> see per main tab.

I'm of the same opinion as Frank (and others) - there should be an
option to remove/add columns to improve the look and feel. Focusing on
look and feel includes this discussion as well (imho) - not just colors.

The login screen posted by Malini looks really great - much better then
the actual one.

I also like the colors of the webadmin interface, but usability is
decreased (in the screenshot) compared with the old design. Let me
explain why:
When I click on Virtual Machines the most important information for me
is the name of a virtual machine, but it's not that easy to find the
name (Name column is smaller as Host, IP Address, Cluster and Data
Center).
If the Name would be bold (or in another color) and columns can be
removed it's much easier for me to find the right vm. Furthermore the
columns for Memory, CPU and Network are ways to big and the green is too
bright - this is just additional information which can be very useful
but shouldn't attract me too much. So I suggest to highlight the vm
names in some way and make the Name column the bigger then all other
(per default - users can resize it anyways).

The blue highlight of the tabs looks nice, but I fear many users will
not recognize these items as tabs.

As a conclusion: I like the new colors a lot, but a few adjustments are
needed to improve the usability.


Regards,
René