Thursday January 16th, 2014 by Björn Balazs

We truly believe that good interaction design is the result of an iterative process. Feedback and inspiration is needed again and again.

Working on the KDE Network Manager has been a great experiment for us in this regard. We tried to gain frequent feedback from a wide community of users by presenting our ideas as mock ups and videos. And we gained tons of inspiration. The current state is much better than what we could have achieved without. The comments of the last post by Jan were all positive – and that is mainly the success of your feedback on earlier stages.

So, I want to take the opportunity to say ‘Thank you!’. We have learned a lot about what we can ask, how we should present the state of the development and so on. Thanks for that and thanks also for helping us shape a great piece of KDE Software.

Lately we have been working on the integration of the last missing bits and pieces into the interface. Not everything is perfect yet and hence we again hope that you will be able to inspire us. The next step will be to finish the interaction concept and then do the visual design – luckily Nuno offered his help on that.

So when you watch the video please leave pure design issues out of the scope of your feedback. Here is the current state (please note that the checkboxes and some buttons are not yet functional!):

Clicking and touch interfaces

In the last posts you asked us if there is an action on single click and how the interface would work for touch interfaces. The answer is pretty simple. Single click will have the same effect as hovering a connection. This is needed to make the interface touch compatible. Also we decided that any further action (e.g. connect / disconnect) would be too error prone, as people might accidentally click on a connection.

Your feedback

Next to your feedback on any aspect of the interaction concept, we also have a question: On the top right you find the configure button, that opens the external dialogue to do all the advanced stuff you can do in network management. We are not 100% satisfied with its current position. Do you have any better idea?

We would also appreciate if you could spread the link in your social networks – it would be great to get feedback even from people outside the KDE community at this stage.