Looking for help with ui/ux/design

[hovancik]

Hi all,

I am looking for help with design/ux/ui of stretchly.

stretchly was always the app I made for myself, and while I tried to make it look nice and all, there's a lot of room for improvement.

Problems:

1. due to different bugs in electron, tray hover behaves differently on different platforms, and right now correctly works only in windows

2. tray menu could use some reorganisation (probably)

3. a lot of people don't understand how break settings work

4. in fact all 3 sections of settings could use a reorganisation to make them more understandable

5. differenced between high and low dpi screens

6. Elements like buttons, links etc doesn't look like they should

7. and more probably

Solution

I think stretchly needs overall redesign and some deep thought about what should be where and how to communicate settings and so on.

For example for tray, I was thinking it could be redesigned to use window instead of menu, similar how other apps do it (to use instead of tray hover and tray menu):

All screens would need to be redesign, and some special thought given to organisation of settings

There's a lot of functionalities on tray and on settings and I'm not good with design so if anyone is willing to help, that would be awesome. This could lead to stretchly version 1.0

If you are a ui/ux person or know someone who is and is using stretchly, let them know.

related:

• Minor UX Issues #420
• Tray Menu Organization #350
• Next break time format does not match OS #318

[decadent]

For the ‘next break’ indication, one option on Mac that I personally like is to put it in the dock icon. AntiRSI does that superbly. The two arcs indicate time to the break and the microbreak:

Since icons in the Mac dock are rather compact compared to Windows' taskbar panels, this doesn't take too much space—but is still legible.

Drawing the dock icon is pretty easy in Electron, and I can share a very similar piece of code from another app of mine. However, such animations in Electron do use some CPU—a handful of percents on lower-end machines but still noticeable.

[ColinLondon]

Happy to help out. I've run a design practice in central London for donkey's years. I've sent you an email. Cheers, Colin.

[mfyz]

Hi @hovancik @cpshanley what's the status of your engagement? We are also a small team that we already internally put dozen of tweaks, some visual tweaks. I'm in the process to create each one of these tweaks as PRs coming your way @hovancik.

On the design side, we also love to contribute together aside with @cpshanley or if it's stalled, we can take over as well.

[hovancik]

Hi @mfyz we are slowly making progress through the screens! I was on holidays but I am now back.

[mfyz]

Awesome @hovancik, let us know if you guys need any help. My team is enthusiastic to help you on the design front.

[balazsnasz]

#537 will "solve" this issue. It's not relevant anymore and should be closed now. @hovancik

[hovancik]

good point, will link so it will get closed when redesign is merged to master.