A) The old window is self-explanatory: the user can clearly see at a glance which is the current note type, which is going to be the new note type, and which fields are going to change in natural language: “Change Francés to Alemán”. Super easy & intuitive.
B) The selectable items are now in the left column, and for some reason (maybe because the natural way of read and thinking -at least for most of the people using left-to-right languages- is from left to right) I would naturally expect that column in the right, as in the old window.
C) The wording “Template” in the new window can be confusing for some users:
So, in summary, while the new change notetype window works perfectly well, I really find the old design much better from a usability perspective, specially for new users.
It makes sense to have interactive elements on the right, as in a form, because you have to read the label before you can make your choice. On the other hand, it would also be weird to read from “New” to “Current”.
That wasn’t a problem in the old window, because the new column was the interactive one. However, as one old field can be mapped to multiple new fields, but not multiple old fields to one new field (1:N relationship), I’d say the new design is the correct one.
There’s really not much information there. Maybe instead of going back to the old labels with embedded field and template names and causing headaches for translators, there could be tooltips like in the new deck option window.
For fields: “Content in fields on the left will be copied into the respective fields on the right.”
For templates: “All the information of cards created from templates on the left, like interval, reviews etc., will be copied to the cards created from the respective templates on the right.” (Well, you get the idea…)
I really like the live feedback about losing data in the new window.
Assigning fields was super buggy for me with the old window. The selections got shuffled for no reason and were prone to get messed up by scrolling. This seems to be solved with the new one. Still, I share your sentiment about that screen, @cqg.
The functionality is certainly improved - I think it’s mostly the UX/Design that’s lacking here. It’s more of a placeholder right now.
With the minimal margins, stacked dropdowns and lack of confinement/framing of elements, it feels a bit unpolished. Moving back to Qt isn’t a viable option in the long run. Instead, we could just improve the UI.
A couple of ideas:
fix the margins
prevent items directly touching the bottom of the window
add margin between dropdowns
separate field and template sections
with some sort of framing for the field and template sections (in the old editor, there was a border around those sections)
two columns (fields, templates) like in the deck options for landscape layout
use notetype names for column headers instead of “Current” and “New”
set a minimal height (currently, you can completely collapse the window)
Looking back, we’ve had a similar situation with the deck options screen. Design simply isn’t a top priority for the devs currently.
@hengiesel If you don’t have any plans for that screen at the moment, I could try to tweak it a bit without adding any functionality (apart from tooltips) to make it more pleasing to the eye and improve the UX.
Mostly sounds good. Regarding changing ‘current’ and ‘new’:
with just the notetype names shown, I’m a bit worried it won’t be clear which is the old and which is the new
notetype names can be long, and on narrow (eg phone) screens, we may not be able to fit them both - so if we do go down that route, they’ll at least need to wrap or be truncated. Narrow screens were also the reason for omitting the label in the top left (which we could add back if we made it hide/show responsively)
Sorry to wake up this old post, but I have a question pertaining precisely to this
And so you did, and it looks great except the current notetype name for me is cut off, looks like there is plenty of space on the right to push the new note type field name over to make room for it. Is this just me? Perhaps this pertains to dae’s observation about long notetype names on mobile screens? If so, can it be fixed on desktop/laptop version?
