brian's blog

As suggested by my KDE mentor, one of my first tasks is to try designing an attractive interface for Knoware. I've been doing mostly web programming for the past year or two, so getting back to using a GUI toolkit has been fun, and working with Qt Designer is a pleasure.

As mentioned in a previous post, the Knoware client will be used to perform three main tasks:

• Detect and display the user's system configuration,
• Browse and report problems the user is experiencing, and
• Collaborate with other users on possible solutions.

Here's what I've come up with so far (click to enlarge):

An announcements panel, the first thing the user sees when opening Knoware. Much more information will be displayed than is currently shown. It will be styled with CSS, so it should look very nice (think of amaroK's sidebar).

A system configuration panel. Self-explanatory. I may try to make the visualization of the user's system a bit more interesting and easier to browse.

A panel for searching and browsing problems. The search results should be updated as the user types. Problem details, instructions to reproduce the problem, and subscribed users will all be shown here. This is also where the statistics Knoware has collected should be displayed — more on how I plan to visualize this later.

A discussion panel. I do have more things in mind for collaborative problem-solving, but this is the most important and flexible, I think. Discussion 'rooms' may be thought of as one-per-problem (like comments on a Bugzilla page). But an interesting feature is that they are both live (like a chat room) and persistent (like a forum). Right now the two forms of communication people turn to for fixing their problems are forums and IRC — this unites the strong points of both. Since live chat may generate a long discussion history, users can flag individual messages to indicate importance. The flag and recycle-bin icons next to the search field are toggle buttons which show only flagged messages and show junk messages, respectively.

Besides putting all this functionality in one place and including a few niceties, there isn't much new here. The novel part about Knoware is, after all, on the server-side: the use of statistical methods to identify patterns. The discovered patterns should be visible to users, since they are the people who have the ability to use the information and apply it. So how can I best visualize this information?

One way might be to think of any general system configuration as a tree (kinda like in the System panel above). There are always certain components in a configuration, and various areas that differ on each system. To visualize what Knoware has discovered, then, might include making such a tree in which only the likely predictors are shown. The more confident Knoware is about a predictor, the bigger or bolder it could show it, or maybe all the other components are shown but grayed out — the important thing is that the likely predictors of the problem stand out.

Another way might be to show a list much like Apple's Spotlight results. Instead of object categories and files, results would be arranged into component categories and predictors, along with some statistical information.

Some mock-ups would convey these ideas much more easily. Maybe I'll post some later.