A few criticisms of BuboFlash
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A few criticisms of BuboFlash
Oh boy, this post turned out to be a lot longer than I intended. I love the idea of BuboFlash, and the work you have put into it so far is wonderful, it just needs a bit more polish before it shows off it's true potential. Don't take my criticisms as indicator that the project is bad, it's certainly not, take it as a "I really want this to be great". I will start using BuboFlash to test how it pans out with more long term usage - the notes I make here are my thoughts after a few hours of usage.
Onto the post
First off, I do enjoy the idea of a wholistic learning software. I especially love the community aspect that has been included in the software - it has great potential and the main reason I'm so interested in this work.
However, as good as everything is right now, the tool is missing quite a bit of very needed polish before it will receive a larger audience. Namely, the layout of the software is not user friendly and is very hard to navigate if you know nothing about how it works. If you want a larger audience, almost all of your work right now should be put into redesigning your layout to make a better and more intuitive initial experience. That is, the main flaw is the web design.
Let me give a few specific examples.
On just about every page, things are very big. This excess size limits how many things can fit on my screen at once, providing an irritating experience where most things I want to see are off screen. It also just makes things hard to look at and hard to locate, eg when searching for something only at most two results fit on screen before I have to scroll again. Things are also just far apart from each other, again making it hard to look at (Fixing this issue alone would help so much).
Related to the bigness of everything, there's just too much whitespace. You don't need to (and shouldn't) use every inch of the page, but currently there's an average of 30% screen usage at any point.
On the homepage, after you log in, there are a ton of buttons, like too many buttons. The main issue though isn't the amount of buttons, rather that the important buttons are mixed in with the unimportant ones. New users don't know what each button does, so they test them all out. You should have them be naturally lead to the important ones to help them understand the purpose and use cases of the software. Right now, on the homepage, the buttons in the important spots are every variety of search and saved searches, which aren't that important to the core of the software and should be hidden a bit more. Another example, the "Install Chrome Extension" button is above the "Manage My PDFs" button.
Related to the mixing of buttons, buttons aren't labeled that well. From the homepage, "🔍 All Docs", then "All Editable Docs" below won't be understood by new users. Instead, have a section off to the side labeled "Search" (don't use the 🔍) with buttons below labeled "Any Editable Doc", "PDFs", "Annotations", etc.
On the homepage, the "new doc" and "new tmpl" section of buttons don't look like buttons (though perhaps this one is just me), it took me awhile to figure out they were clickable. Because two of the buttons were blue, they looked like some sort of filter for the page.
That's enough about initial user experience, onto a few other things.
It is paramount that you have some sort of manual. Videos are fine, but they get tedious to refer back to. On top of that, they are hard to maintain (cant just update them) and cant possibly include all needed information for a project this large.
Your landing page is cluttered. The videos don't belong there (make a separate page and link to it), and the quotes take up too much space. The fantastic "BuboFlash is" section at the button should be closer to the top and visible immediately upon the screen loading. It would be nice if you outlined a few of BuboFlashes features on the page too (eg, you have a pdf reader, impressive! Tell us! Tell us about a bit about your algorithm you worked so hard on too. One of Anki's flaws is it's algorithm, you can one-up it).
Thank you for your time =)
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I love the idea of BuboFlash, and the work you have put into it so far is wonderful, it just needs a bit more polish before it shows off it's true potential.
Thanks a lot!
take it as a "I really want this to be great". I will start using BuboFlash to test how it pans out with more long term usage.
I certainly will take it as you say, and you are welcome to comment as you go, I encourage you to do so. I really appreciate that you are going to share a feedback of your Buboflash journey and I will try to help to iron out issues.
As at the moment I am working on Personal Buboflash, that can run on your computer, synchronise data with main server but other than that - work offline. It will still take me some time, data synchronisation protocols are difficult, and in the meantime we can discuss directions in which UI can be pushed.
On just about every page, things are very big (...) there's just too much whitespace.
Buboflash uses https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/components/ which is sort of large and uses whitespace a lot, contrary to say Gmail or Google Docs. This is an open question to everybody - maybe we should have a separate topic for it - can you think of any good alternative for main layout library? I specifically chose Bootstrap because it is purely layout library, I don't want framework like Vue/Angular/React. It would be good if the layout library played nicely with both desktops and Androids/iPhones. There is the homepage, search pages, document page (flashcard, annotation, image, article) and PDF or website reading view - these are the main ones, and I would start with converting one of them to to the newer, denser layout, see how it goes. The other problem is that Bubo is not really tested on any other browser than Chrome, and I noticed issues here and there.
the buttons in the important spots are every variety of search and saved searches, which aren't that important to the core of the software and should be hidden a bit more. Another example, the "Install Chrome Extension" button is above the "Manage My PDFs" button.
I thought searches were important :)
You can learn in subsets defined by searches, e.g. only repetitions in "finance" tag, or only repetitions from a given PDF book.
The logical layout - flow - is to upload a PDF or open website for reading and annotate. So let's say these 2 go to the very top. You sometimes just add flashcards by hand - so the blue "New flashcard" can go there as well. When you have flashcards in the learning process already, the buttons to repeat and drill are at the very top, which I think is fine. But - this visual design does not give a hint that you can narrow down repetitions by search.
The way I did incremental reading is really an extended search, with priority queue that you can manipulate. If I take "incremental reading" search outside of Annotations search box, will it not make it disconnected, and you will have a problem guessing that you can do incremental reading within search result?
On the homepage, the "new doc" and "new tmpl" section of buttons don't look like buttons (though perhaps this one is just me)
Agree, only flashcards, images, annotations are important enough to be at the top row for new documents. Custom templates, nobody uses them.
Because two of the buttons were blue, they looked like some sort of filter for the page.
I haven't thought of it, but indeed it looks like blue buttons are "ON", the others are "OFF"
It is paramount that you have some sort of manual.
As a matter of fact manual - when it exists - can be edited in Buboflash itself, I played with the idea here: https://buboflash.eu/bubo5/show-dao2?d=3757616794892 If an article is open to editing, by default people will see versions saved by the author (so it may be me in the case of the 'official' manual) and anybody I follow. I can add to my followee list people who would be making edits to the manual articles, so it will make their edits the same priority as mine's.
Now, I was not really writing large articles in Buboflash yet, and I am not sure if it is the best experience. Again, we may open a separate thread with suggestions. The obvious missing feature now is that you cannot drop images into the editor, you have to create them separately, and this missing feature is shared with the regular flashcard editor. Buboflash uses the combination of CKEditor and CodeMirror, so you can edit both as WYSIWG and raw HTML. It does some HTML post processing on the server side and has some hacks to make the content of editable document play nicely with the layout of the whole page, whith things like IDs of HTML elements and master CSS. Allowing for any arbitrary HTML, as I do, causes issues that you don't have in programs like Gmail or Google Docs, which does not let you manipulate HTML directly (unless I am missing something). I have no experience with other systems that people use for online editing, e.g. I don't know how wordpress work, I know that Wikipedia's editing is really clumsy though, so - any suggestions?
Your landing page is cluttered. The videos don't belong there (make a separate page and link to it), and the quotes take up too much space. The fantastic "BuboFlash is" section at the button should be closer to the top and visible immediately upon the screen loading. It would be nice if you outlined a few of BuboFlashes features on the page too (eg, you have a pdf reader, impressive! Tell us!
That one is the easiest :) Will do.
Tell us about a bit about your algorithm you worked so hard on too.
I will write something on the algorithm.
Thank you for your time too!