UI confusion as a new user

[majeric]

Canton7, I appreciate the summary.

I don’t think there’s anything terribly complex, in theory, about this tool that a well presented UX would probably guide the user through the initial set up. Perhaps advanced configuration or unusual circumstances are best defined by the User Documentation.

The said, user documentation is notorious for not really adequately explaining concepts.

Engineers have a bad habit of documenting like this:

“Folder ID: Unique Identifier for your folder”.

A rewording of a concept that seems obvious to them because they have the established conceptual model in their head.

@canton7

It is not clear that a folder cannot be relocated, or its ID changed (other than those fields being disabled, but it’s not clear why they’re disabled, or what should be done about it).

I’d find a way of removing this constraint not force the user to accept it.

@canton7

I think it may be better to leave the list of folders empty to start. If no folders are present, display some text explaining what a folder is, how folders relate to devices, and how to add one. Likewise with the device list: if it’s empty, explain what a Device is, how Devices are added, and how Devices relate to Folders.

As a user who shares a folder among others, it’s not immediately obvious to me that I need to wait for the remote server to trigger the addition of that folder. I accidentally deleted the “default” folder thinking that it was the only way I could reconfigure the default local directory for that folder and I tried adding “default” back not realizing that it was, in essence creating a separate “default” folder.

It might be nice if the “Refresh” button triggered a callback to remote systems to sync with the local system and ensure that all Folders are set up.

Also, one other point, The popup-dialogs that I think are warnings, are dismissable by clicking outside of them. I accidentally dismissed one when refocusing back to my Syncthing folder before I got a chance to read it.

Dismissing a dialog should only be a common UI element like or [Cancel] or [Okay] or some other limited region that is clearly marked as a means of closing the warning.

I have no idea if there was some critical information in that dialog.

[AudriusButkevicius]

@majeric

They are well established UX concepts?

We have no functionality for public folders, so there is no point to talk about UX of things that don’t exist.

Also, it’s the first time I head about “groups” in the context of file sharing, so I am not sure what you are talking about, nor how it makes anything better.

The problem with Drive and Dropbox is that there is NOTHING you need to set up, you just install it, it connects to uncle sam, and off you go. Sadly, this is impossible to achieve with syncthing, as there is no uncle sam involved.

I am pretty sure that most people don’t need documentation to set up syncthing, though I agree that it is more complex than setting up Drive or Dropbox. Saying “just use an established model” doesn’t work because the concepts are different, same way just pay with a card concept in a grocery store does not work when trying to do your tax return.

[AudriusButkevicius]

Never the less, I’d rather spend energy discussing concrete well defined, achievable UX improvements, rather than some conceptual “just use the well established, well known dropbox model” which have no meaning in the context we are in.