Overall design ideas for client (screenshots inside)

[madeinffm]

Hey ownClouders!,

We had a great time at the last ownCloud-Meetup here in Frankfurt. We're designers and using the ownCloud client extensively in our office. We thought about if there is something we as designers can contribute. So we talked to @dragotin at the meetup and decided to spend a day thinking about the client.

Here you'll find our results. A few comments:

• We did not try to reinvent the wheel and incorporated all of the elements of the current client
• We sketched two versions of the client (which are basically identical besides the compact header vs. traditional toolbar)
• In addition we thought about the Wizard and how we could improve the experience and the brand connection to ownCloud
• We also had a few new ideas we'd like to share (e.g. menubar-menu). We don't know wether these are feasible or doable, but we hope they spark some discussions and other ideas along the way
• All screenshots are using macOS Interface Elements (we only have macs here ;) ), but we're sure a lot of the interface elements can be found on windows and linux aswell
• Besides the screens we did a few icons, which we also would like to share. It's just a beginning, but maybe we can think about a consistent iconography throughout the client
• Nothing is final in any way ;)

We're looking forward to your feedback & ideas!

Cheers!
Lukas, Daniel, Christian and Florian from made in

[madeinffm]

How on earth do we assign labels to issues ;D, @dragotin? Thanks!

[enoch85]

[enoch85]

All we need now is a PR :D 🚀

[enoch85]

@jancborchardt Have you seen this? Amazing!

[docmak]

Love it guys. This is looking great. When do I get this? ;)

[supportreq]

@madeinffm this is amazing!!

[danimo]

@docmak Once somebody puts this into code. No sooner.

[danimo]

@madeinffm Thanks for the mockups, some nice ideas in there! They're quite an improvement over the current design. However, I wonder how we can overcome a couple of issues:

• The designs are Mac centric. We need a design that works across platforms, or a way to make it simple to accomodate for drastic platform customization. So far, resource constraints have been limiting our attention to detail. With the amount of platforms and operating system versions we have to support, its easy to catch regressions. We need to find a way to overcome that.
• They do not reflect the fact that one can have multiple accounts
• We need an alternative approach for OSes that only allow menus in the icon bar.
• We currently allow people to brand the client. This approach would basically mean to throw a lot of things over board, which is something we need to consider.

[jancborchardt]

@madeinffm good stuff! As @danimo said it needs some consideration. Also see some previous mockups and design issues which are similar, especially on the tray menu:
#1748 – Design forward: Improved tray menu
Unfortunately this seems to be difficult to realize properly with the technology and cross-platform, hence no real progress on that since I made that spec in 2014.

[tflidd]

Regarding the multi-account (@danimo):
They seem to use different accounts on the folder overview: [email protected] and [email protected]... So they just show the different mount points which can refer to different accounts. Creating new folder-syncs you would need to change the setup process if you want to use an existing account or add a new one. If you only sync to very few folders on very few folders (let's say less than 5 different mount points), this cleans up the interface.

[madeinffm]

Heyho everybody,

thanks so much for your kind words and feedback.

To take these sketches one step further, we think it would good to separate two aspects of the client:

1) Tray-Menu:

As a lot of you mentioned, it's pretty hard to do cross-platform. So it's nothing for the short- or midterm. In our opinion it's the way to go longterm from a UX/UI perspective. But for now we can keep it in a sketch-everything-is-possible kind of phase. That would help us to think freely from constraints and to think about the best possible experience for the user.

2) Client Main Window

The client main window is the thing we imagine could be improved step by step, little by little. As @danimo mentioned, the design at the moment is mac-centric, but in our opinion not mac exclusive. We think it's doable on other platforms, with given UI Elements as well.

To further proceed on these two topics it would be great to have more input from you guys, so that we can push the designs in the right direction:

Tray Menu

• @danimo: Yeah, there is an idea for multiple accounts (There is an option at the end of the window), but it's not very prominent, we agree. Do you have any insights on the average numbers of accounts people have? Sure, it has to work with X-Numbers of accounts, but we could optimize the interface for the most common case and have a fallback (one click more) for less-common-cases.
• @jancborchardt, thanks for the input regarding issue Design forward: Improved tray menu [$15] #1748. Haven't seen this ;)

Client Main Window

• @danimo: Where do you think will be the biggest pain points regarding cross-platform compability?
• Are there other windows-devs here, who could pinpoint these/other painpoints?
• @danimo: What options are there for branding the client? "Just" a logo? Also colors/fonts? Can you provide us with a list / screenshot? We try to incorprate these things in the design then as well.

General Questions

• What about the wizard? Did we miss something? Is there something we can improve on? What about additional features etc, anything planned yet to incorporate into the wizard?

Thanks!
Florian and the team at made in

[madeinffm]

Hey Guys,
any updates on this? Or are all of you busy?

Thanks!
Florian

[danimo]

@madeinffm Yes, sorta. Which is a bad excuse, so let's follow up :)

I'll concentrate on the wizard for now:

What font did you use? We cannot use any arbitrary font, it has to be an open one that we can distribute with the app.

In Step 3, we also have "Skip folder configuration". This is sort of an advanced mode, where we allow people to set an n:n relation, rather than a 1:1 relation (i.e. sync the Local Documents folder to Private/Documents on the Server, Local Pictures to Photography/Pictures on the Server and so forth. These two modes are hard to communicate in the wizard, where things should be easy, so we neglected it a bit. So if you have a good idea for communicating this feature, go ahead, otherwise, we'll at least need to re-introduce this button.

The rest in the wizard should be doable.