Interface

[Jacqueline Sandi]

Hello,
  I am a graphic design student, and I am finishing my undergraduate
research in graphical interfaces. And the object of my study is being
ImageJ. My proposal will provide an interface for ImageJ. And I want to
share my proposal so I finish. I would like the opinion of the group, can
be?


Jacqueline Sandi

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ImageJ mailing list: http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/list.html

[nicola giacobbe]

I suppose (but of course I am not speaking for the whole group) that there
is no problem about giving an opinion but it really depends on what do you
mean for it. If it would concern testing a new gui and reporting the
results then you'll be better off doing in a custom website, cleanly
explaining what do you want to do and looking for beta testers (just a
suggestion, you know). Apart from the remark I am curious about it: have
you developed a new GUI? Or, just as interesting, have done some studying
about the ergonomicity of image processing interfaces? These studies alone
could be very well worth a reading.

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 5:59 AM, Jacqueline Sandi <[hidden email]>wrote:

> Hello,
>   I am a graphic design student, and I am finishing my undergraduate
> research in graphical interfaces. And the object of my study is being
> ImageJ. My proposal will provide an interface for ImageJ. And I want to
> share my proposal so I finish. I would like the opinion of the group, can
> be?
>
>
> Jacqueline Sandi
>

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ImageJ mailing list: http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/list.html

[dscho]

Hi Jacqueline,

On Fri, 14 Jun 2013, Jacqueline Sandi wrote:

>   I am a graphic design student, and I am finishing my undergraduate
>   research in graphical interfaces. And the object of my study is being
>   ImageJ. My proposal will provide an interface for ImageJ. And I want
>   to share my proposal so I finish. I would like the opinion of the
>   group, can be?

That would be awesome!

As you probably know, the vast majority of ImageJ users and contributors
are biologists (with a couple of mathematicians, computer scientists, etc
thrown in), but preciously few experts in user interfaces.

Also: You might not yet be aware of the next generation of ImageJ
(http://developer.imagej.net/, beta7 was just released)? It is based on a
completely new and modular architecture which allowed us to make a user
interface that looks very similar to ImageJ 1.x but is using Swing. We
also have a proof-of-concept user interface that looks just as similar to
ImageJ 1.x but uses SWT instead. This is possible because user interfaces
are just plugins in ImageJ2.

The whole point of making the new user interface look very much like the
old one is to make it easy for existing users: as you know, users who got
used to any given user interface (however unintuitive it might look to an
outsider) cry murder, death, and war, if you dare to change the user
interface, even if the changes make the application more usable.

Having said that, one of the major reasons to make the architecture of the
new ImageJ more modular was to allow for heavy customization. I personally
know people who would refuse any change in the ImageJ user interface, but
I also personally met people who refused to use ImageJ "because of the
unintuitive user interface". So ImageJ2 allows both: you simply swap in a
different user interface, and voila, it looks completely differently (but
of course it works exactly the same, can make use of all plugins, scripts,
macros, etc)!

If you want to provide a new user interface, therefore, I'd like to
suggest doing it as a user interface plugin to ImageJ 2. That way, you
will have not only something pretty to look at, but also something people
can play with.

Ciao,
Johannes

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[dscho]

Hi Michael,

I hope you do not mind that I share this with the list, but the comic
made me smile and maybe it does that to others, too ;-)

On Fri, 14 Jun 2013, Cammer, Michael wrote:

> The ImageJ interface is not intuitive?  It is clean, minimal, efficient
> and intuitive in that it follows conventions more than 20 years old so
> it is really easy to learn.

Well, *I* had no problems with it. But as I said, I have met people who
found the minimalistic UI hard to use. I guess that different people have
different preferences...

> And even more important, for a tool such as this, change is bad.  Moving
> a button slows us down.  And changing a working feature for aesthetic
> reasons is an anathema.  See attached comic from yesterday's paper.

I found it on dilbert.com:

http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/80000/7000/200/187279/187279.strip.zoom.gif

And again, I agree: for me, the ImageJ UI does not need to change. Having
said that, I can see situations where you want a different UI, e.g. when
training a new person to a mere subset of what ImageJ can do, but very
fast. That's one reason I write macros with new dialogs: to streamline
workflows. But still, sometimes you actually want to hide the full-fledged
user interface and show some UI elements that make a particular task at
hand easier (while taking away the full power of ImageJ).

Ciao,
Dscho

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