| [orion-dev] Orion UI layout changes coming very soon |
Hi,
Last Friday at the Orion UX meeting, I showed some UI design changes that we're working on applying to Orion. Here is a link to the direction we're working on:
http://goo.gl/mvaVCC
And to another mock up showing a new side menu bar for navigating to pages.
http://goo.gl/3aeEI4
This work has happened incredibly quickly - all within the last couple of weeks, and it is a considered response to feedback - that sometimes links were difficult to find in Orion - and building on our responses to user feedback throughout 2013.
We spent the first couple of weeks in the year trying to figure out how to make it easier for ( especially new ) Orion developers to find things, and concluded that the best approach was to offer menus that most developers would be familiar with in an IDE. It also helps us organize the extensions to the interface more. Page links will appear in the hamburger, or vertically in the side menu, and actions appear horizontally in the File, Edit, Tools etc menus.
We've been rapidly prototyping the UI in the past week, and now the working code in our branch is accumulating and getting close to these designs. We wanted to make sure that this change was workable.
The intention is that developers using Orion will experience a familiar layout and approach to developing code - they can view a tree, context menus, and a common menu bar - but in a clean and efficient web page - or they can collapse the tree and side Menu and work on a clean simple page to edit their code. We have some versatility with the components and behaviors that we've cultivated in Orion.
This UI departs from the plus menu / gear menu / deploy menu approach - that we realise is very appropriate for a mobile device, but perhaps not as intuitive on a big screen for people experiencing Orion for the first time. We plan to hold on to the concept and work on responsive views as time progresses.
This email is acts as a heads up ... that we'll need to push our changes soon. I'll blog about the background to these changes in the coming weeks.
As always feedback is welcome.
Anton