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UX Walkthrough

This evaluation was performed by clicking through each screen and dialog in the UI. Items that require more info or a graphic from UX are marked as such.

In general, items in each section are listed in order of severity.

Contents 1 High level areas of concern 2 Dashboard 3 Networks 4 Smart Pools 4.1 Summary 4.2 Hosts 4.3 Storage 4.4 Pools 4.5 Virtual machines 4.6 User Access 4.7 Tasks 5 "default" Hardware Pool 5.1 Hardware pools : Storage 5.2 Hardware pools : Virtual Machine Pools 6 VM Pools 6.1 VM pool : Virtual Machines 7 All Dialogs 8 Details pane 9 Confirmation Dialogs and Messages 10 Etc.

High level areas of concern

• Need to introduce more contextual navigation, making things a link when it makes sense. The current UI forces you to work harder to get from one place to another.
• The UI should prevent error cases and confirm all delete and remove actions.
• Language improvements. We should improve the quality and usefulness of messages; Terminology consistency; human readability of info, particularly in the grids.
• Visual issues here and there - relatively low effort to fix.

Dashboard

• (UX todo) We should have a more meaningful graphic and placeholder arrangement when there are no tasks. The placeholder message should clearly say what would be displayed in this spot otherwise.
• "Dashboard" in the left nav tree not highlighted here but should be. The tree should always display a highlight based on where you are.

Networks

• (UX todo) Button graphic for "Add Networks" is a generic icon, needs to be replaced
• When deleting network, we should confirm to user - see more on this below in Confirmation Dialogs and Messages
• Tree should display highlight on Networks, indicating you are here
• Add Networks dialog needs work - see http://ovirt.org/page/Networking_UX
• Details pane
  • If there are multiple usages indicated, comma separate them like "Guest, Storage"
  • Labels become misaligned when there are multiple networks
    • 

Smart Pools

Summary

• For this page, it seems we should show same summary type info we do elsewhere. We should resolve any open issues regarding this as soon as possible.
• See new design for Summary pages here http://ovirt.org/page/Summary_UX

Hosts

• Add Host dialog
  • Selection model broken - I could not add hosts. I expect the checkboxes to create the selection here.
  • There is a phantom link to help in the dialog subheader, it should be removed.
• We should confirm removal of hosts

Storage

• Add storage dialog - same comments as Add Host dialog.
• When the view is empty, the text for adding storage volume does not match toolbar button text - which is accurate?
• We should confirm removal of storage
• We could improve the visual alignment of the storage pool tree

Pools

• Add Pools dialog very hard to use. Not obvious that clicking a title selects and confirms. User should select first, then click OK. This tree is showing a hover effect on some children and not others. Should show on all (and this hover behavior is missing on the left navigator).
• We should confirm removal of hosts
• In the grid, we should have a wider column for Name by default

Virtual machines

• When the view is empty, the text for adding virtual machine not consistent with toolbar button text.
• Empty message improvements
• When I select a VM in a smartpool, I should see what host & VM Pool it belongs to and a link to those (in Details)
• Column for Memory should be wider so that "MB" is not cut off
• We should confirm removal of VMs, and especially be clear this is not a delete.

User Access

• (UX todo) Button for "Add User" is using generic icon, needs to be replaced
• checkboxes missing?
• Add User dialog
  • remove pool info at the top of the form (redundant)
  • reverse the order so that you select the user first.
  • Add role descriptions. Redesign the dialog so that it shows the 4 roles beside radio buttons instead of a selector. Each role could have its title, followed by a description beneath, so users know what the permissions mean.
  • Language problem - button says "Add User" while the dialog button says "Create User Permission" and the remove confirmation message says "User roles were successfully deleted" What is the correct verbiage here?
• Consider adding a details pane that describes the permissions of a given role. This way, I could select a role in the grid and see the role descriptions.

Tasks

• Resizing the Created column breaks the grid
• Left align these columns: Item, User, Created,
• Is there a better way to see the Message text? It gets clipped easily, especially longer messages. Resizing the columns to see the message is tedious.
  • We could show the entire text on hover of the message text, or
  • show message text as part of the State tooltip, and remove the Message column.
• Replace Action column values with natural language equivalents (eg. "poweroff_vm" becomes "Poweroff"
• The items column - it would be nice if the individual items were links, giving the user a quick path to the actual item so they can take action. For example on a VM, you should be able to click on the title to navigate to it, in its "native" VM pool

"default" Hardware Pool

• Let's rename this to Default out of the box - or other suggestions? At least capitalize this heading like the others.
• bad bug - If you try to rename the Hardware pool, it bombs everything

Hardware pools : Storage

• The Add buttons and dialogs not consistent in language or icons

Hardware pools : Virtual Machine Pools

• Inconsistent action labels. Action menu says Add Storage Server while default message says Add first storage volume and the dialog that comes up says Add Storage Pool Which term should we use?
• Load column - what does it really mean? Seems to match to "Memory" but this is not clear?
• Adding a new empty VM pool with no VM's immediately shows full load 100% - however, the tooltip says 46%. Shouldn't this be 0% as there are no machines int he pool yet?
• Would be nice if the pool name column was a link (or show a link in details), so that you could navigate to the VM pool and could populate with VMs.
• We should confirm delete of VM pools

VM Pools

VM pool : Virtual Machines

• When you select a VM, you have an action to Cancel queued tasks. However, there is no visibility on to what queued tasks may exists. Adding a way to see queued tasks would be a huge improvement.

All Dialogs

• Order of dialog buttons nees to be changed,and change button labels to standard "Cancel/OK". Change all to the following
  • Cancel OK
  • Cancel Back Next (wizard, not last page)
  • Cancel Back Finish (wizard, last page)
• Fix broken div for bottom buttons. In many of the dialogs the bottom button bar background does not extend to the full width of the dialog
• Radio buttons and checkboxes should be on the left side, not the right (see Remove Storage Pools dialog)

Details pane

• Once you perform an action on an item, you lose the selection in the grid, though the details pane still shows details. Users get errors on subsequent tasks they try to perform from the details pane.
• Enable details pane to be resized vertically by the user with drag handle
• Suggest to implement a better layout:

Confirmation Dialogs and Messages

• All destructive actions should ask the user if they are sure they want to do it, even if it is just removing something. Many desctructive actions in the UI right now can be done with no confirmation.
• All confirmation messages should reference the item being acted on, especially deletes. For example, If I am going to delete a VM named "bigdog", the message would state: Are you sure you want to delete the VM "bigdog"? Cancel, OK.
• All warning and confirmation messages should be reviewed for content. Many could be made more natural. (ex: "add Vms successful.")
• Fail confirmation messages should use a different icon (we are using green check right now for all messages)
• When multiple messages are displayed, we nicely provide a way to dismiss them all. However, When clicking "[close all]" it should go away with the other messages, instead of sliding up first and remaining for a second or so. Also I would suggest to change the text to "Close All"
• I would suggest a shorter timeout for messages to disappear (half as long?)

Etc.

• Doing a browser refresh makes you go back to dashboard, expected behavior would be to stay on the view you are in.
• Action bar menus should require a click to show, instead of showing on hover. Filed: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479766
• No matter how tall my window is, I have a vertical scrollbar on FF 3, Mac.
• Tree navigator should always indicate a selection, but does not in some cases.
• After performing an action on a selection in the grid, it should remain selected.
  • Example: After editing a network, it should remain selected when you are finished
• In forms, when required fields are left empty, show only the "This field is required" error. Currently the field name and multiple errors display in the error area (see Edit Routing Info > New IP address.)
• Create Smartpool dialog - Remove redundant sub-headline

Augeas

A configuration editing tool and API

libvirt

The open source virtualization API

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OS provisioning and profile management

oVirt

Virtualization management across the data center

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Identity, policy and audit management

Virtual Machine Manager

Virtualization management from the desktop