andych Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 While playing when click table or tourney, a portion of the chat window will show lobby/tourney. Could a new window be popped up instead of lobby/tourney? ;) :ph34r: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 While playing when click table or tourney, a portion of the chat window will show lobby/tourney. Could a new window be popped up instead of lobby/tourney? ;) :ph34r: Maybe we will make that an option one day (and it might be one day in the relatively near future). We are currently doing some serious thinking about some major redesign work of both the basic client/server architecture and some aspects of the user interface. We are not doing this so much because we want to, but the fact of the matter is that our current model will eventually break down if the BBO membership continues to grow at a rapid pace. The reason we currently try to put as much into 1 big window as possible is that a large percentage of our users are not very good with computers and such people are generally uncomfortable using applications that pop up new windows all over the place. If we can find an elegant way to make things like what you suggest an option, we will likely do so eventually. This is one area where the standard Windows controls for such things are not very good in my view. This is not exactly a high priority change for us, but it may be something that fits in naturally with the rest of our redesign efforts. Fred GitelmanBridge Base Inc.www.bridgebase.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TimG Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 The reason we currently try to put as much into 1 big window as possible is that a large percentage of our users are not very good with computers and such people are generally uncomfortable using applications that pop up new windows all over the place. You mean like the way table information, player profile, cards played to the last trick, tournament information, etc. just pop up when the pointer happens over a certain part of the screen? Whether the user wanted the information or not. :-) Tim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 Tim - those are not "windows" - what you are referring to is a completely different issue than the one I mentioned. Ideally there should be options to turn on/off mouseover effects too, but there is a tradeoff there as well. There are already a lot of options in BBO and many people have trouble sifting through the existing options. We are hesistant to add new options unless we think they will be widely used because each new option we add reduces the utility of our options dialog boxes. Believe it or not, all interface design decisions are made for a reason and we do not make such decisions lightly. You may not agree with all of our reasons, but we do not just make decisions because we feel like it. Fred GitelmanBridge Base Inc.www.bridgebase.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bestguru Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 I like the mouse over popups. Simple and efficient. I must say that I was appalled when I first logged into bbo online. It looked like a giant mess. However, it did not take long to get a handle on it. Overall, I would say its a good interface for less experienced users. I think dockable windows would be a nice approach to Andych's request. These windows normally be just part of the main window but could be minimized into an icon along the lower right side ( or wherever ) or dragged of into seperate windows. You might want to make an option in the options dialog to allow dockable windows to be seperated to prevent novice users from being confused. -edit- Posted that while Fred was replying. The option I meantioned above would be too trivial for the options dialog. Perhaps an advanced options tab would be good? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TimG Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 Believe it or not, all interface design decisions are made for a reason and we do not make such decisions lightly. You may not agree with all of our reasons, but we do not just make decisions because we feel like it. I do believe you. I know we disagree on this aspect of the design. I just could not resist a light hearted reply -- I hoped the smiley conveyed that it was light hearted rather than a serious jab. Tim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 Believe it or not, all interface design decisions are made for a reason and we do not make such decisions lightly. You may not agree with all of our reasons, but we do not just make decisions because we feel like it. I do believe you. I know we disagree on this aspect of the design. I just could not resist a light hearted reply -- I hoped the smiley conveyed that it was light hearted rather than a serious jab. Tim Don't worry - I knew you were not being completely serious and in any case I am pretty hard to offend. Please keep in mind that on a typical day I receive several phone calls and e-mails from people that suffer from problems like the following (I am not kidding): - Do not know that their mouse has a right button- Do not know that you can "minimize" a window and, that if you minimize your AOL window, you do not have to be afraid that you will never be able to get it back- Do not understand the difference between a web site and a program- Do not know how to make the @ symbol on their keyboard- Have never clicked that mysterious "Start" button before- Do not know that when I tell them that they should not "double click" that means that they should not click twice quickly in the same place- Do not know how to spell "base"- Do not know that when you want to go to a web site you should type its address in your browser's "address bar" and not in the "search" area- Are not familiar with words like "window" and "button" (which can make it difficult to have a conversation relating to technical support) If the solution to whatever problem these people are having involves such advanced concepts as files, folders, control panel, downloading, or (God forbid) firewalls, I am really in trouble. As a practical matter we have to at least try to cater to these people when we make decision decisions. Fred GitelmanBridge Base Inc.www.bridgebase.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andych Posted February 4, 2005 Author Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 About the BBO interface....BBO is unlike other online bridge sites. Others use traditional windows interface with drop down menus/popup windows/etcAny reason that BBO is different... just curious ;) :ph34r: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TimG Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 Please keep in mind that on a typical day I receive several phone calls and e-mails from people that suffer from problems like the following (I am not kidding): I have a mother; none of the problems you list surprise me in the least. Tim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 About the BBO interface....BBO is unlike other online bridge sites. Others use traditional windows interface with drop down menus/popup windows/etcAny reason that BBO is different... just curious ;) :ph34r: 3 main reasons why we don't use a menu bar: 1) Many years ago I used to play on OKBridge and it always annoyed me that you had to use a menu bar for simple and frequent operations like claiming, seeing last trick, looking at convention cards, finding out who was at the table... I found this annoying not only becuase you had to move your mouse a long way and click twice to invoke these functions, but also because I could never remember which functions were on which menus. Probably there were "hot keys" for these operations, but if you read my post in this thread about the computer skills of many of our members, you will understand why "hot keys" are not a good answer to these problems. It is also possible that the OKB designers could have done a better job at organizing the menus in order to make it more obvious where various functions could be found. However, in my view almost all programs that use menu bars that contain an extensive number of commands suffer from this same problem - it is usually not obvious what menu to look at if you want to find a given command (and even if you find it you have to do a lot of reading to locate the command you are looking for). Probably many people eventually learn which menus to try, but it doesn't seem to happen to me. My conclusion: the menu bar is not a particularly effective interface object. 2) One of the complaints I used to hear a lot on OKB was that playing on that site did not feel like "real bridge". One of my primary goals with BBO was to do a better job in this area. Two critical aspects of the BBO interface that attempt to deal with this issue are: - When you are declarer the dummy looks like the dummy (as opposed to looking like a horizontal row of cards, just like the other 3 hands). - The "card animation" gives the user a better sense of who is playing what card when (as opposed to cards just appearing in the middle of the table when they are played, a la OKB and other programs). The "dummylike dummy" requires a lot of vertical screen space and vertical screen space was at a real premium in the days when 800x600 was the default resolution on new PCs. Menu bars take up vertical screen space that I could not afford to give up. 3) I thought that menu bars were neither necessary nor desirable in BBO. Obviously it is not necessary because we have survived this long without one. I don't think it is desirable because using a button bar for common things like claims is easier on the user. Using mouseover of things like the pile of tricks to find out the contents of the last trick, of player names to find out more about the player, or or bids to find out alert info about that bid, is (hopefully) more intuitive and natural for most users. Hope you are convinced that I made a good decision. Uday is not totally convinced, by the way, but up until now he has been willing to defer to my judgment in this area. Fred GitelmanBridge Base Inc.www.bridgebase.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 Forgot to mention one important thing: Some aspects of the BBO interface predate BBO itself - the same basic look and feel was used in some of our educational products. Those programs did not need a menu bar and I wanted to keep the interface used in BBO as similar as possible to the interface that we used in our CDs. Fred GitelmanBridge Base Inc.www.bridgebase.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TimG Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 1) Many years ago I used to play on OKBridge and it always annoyed me that you had to use a menu bar for simple and frequent operations like claiming, seeing last trick, looking at convention cards, finding out who was at the table... I found this annoying not only becuase you had to move your mouse a long way and click twice to invoke these functions, but also because I could never remember which functions were on which menus. Probably there were "hot keys" for these operations, but if you read my post in this thread about the computer skills of many of our members, you will understand why "hot keys" are not a good answer to these problems. I don't know if there were hot keys, but you didn't have to use the menus. Typing: "/claim" was enough to claim; typing "/who" was enough to see who was at your table; typing "/stats user" was enough to see a user's profile (whether "user" was online or not). I understand that the ability to type commands into the message box is not a solution that would serve a lot of people well. But, I sure thought it was nice not to have to use the menus. BTW, these were all commands that were holdovers from the days when OKbridge was text based rather than graphics based. Tim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.