[Qgis-developer] User profiles

Wed Oct 24 21:44:29 PDT 2012

Hi Alistair,

My QGIS setup has 4 toobars across the top of the screen.  If I introduce someone to that, who is not familiar with GIS, their eyes glaze over... one lost potential user. Multiplied several times.

Is QGIS intended to be used by everyone, from novices to GIS experts?
It does not do that well at present (IMHO) hence our significant investment in the simpler Quantum Map application.

The current toolbars/menus are confusing. Related tasks are not obviously grouped together - the feature select tool is a critical part of digitising, but the icon is in a different menu... which is confusing and not that logical.

QGIS became popular because it could be downloaded & used by almost anyone. The enhancements from v1.0 to now are a fantastic step forward, and bring QGIS to a huge range of more expert users, but at the expense of the traditional ones. I'm sure the current flexible toolbar options can be enhanced to provide a QGIS which can be set up a a simple to learn & use mapping tool, to a bioinformatics or hydrological, etc, GIS workstation.

Having dockable toolbars, which users can add & remove icons to/from, & with icons able to be added to multiple toolbars would allow  a range of "interface settings", simple, mapping, vector editing (digitising), etc, but also a hydrological, etc toolbar. Plugins could be added to whatever toolbar the user required, to meet their needs.

I don't see how adding this capability makes using QGIS harder for anyone, especially if it can be installed with several initial example configurations to choose from. 

Perhaps the user could manage a set of toolbars (create/delete/edit) and can add whatever icons (tools) they want to any toolbar.

Plugins are added as types of tools, & can be added to toolbars. Having an interface to manage tools & toolbars creates a facility which it is very hard to hide tools or functionality, if well implemented. Tool metadata cold be supported, so users could search for "hydrological:, or "digitising" to find a list of those available.
Any configuration could be saved & reloaded (even uploaded to an online repository of QGIS GUI congigurations, much like plugins...)

Or does something along these lines not have wide appeal? 

Cheers,

  Brent Wood

--- On Thu, 10/25/12, Alister Hood <Alister.Hood at synergine.com> wrote:

From: Alister Hood <Alister.Hood at synergine.com>
Subject: Re: [Qgis-developer] User profiles
To: "qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org" <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Date: Thursday, October 25, 2012, 3:28 PM

> Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 09:56:47 +0700
> From: Marco Bernasocchi <marco at bernawebdesign.ch>
> To: qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> Subject: Re: [Qgis-developer] User profiles
> Message-ID: <508758EF.4030207 at bernawebdesign.ch>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> On 10/24/2012 09:53 AM, Alister Hood wrote:
> > Hi guys,
> >
> >> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 18:43:50 +0200
> >> From: Martin Dobias <wonder.sk at gmail.com>
> >> To: Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>
> >> Cc: qgis-developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
> >> Subject: Re: [Qgis-developer] User profiles
> >> Message-ID:
> >>         <CAC2XbFfjRANmX52NNoW7KHYPO5uG0H_FhV=P+N70p1yWqnHA2A at mail.gmail.com>
> >> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> >>
> >> Hi Paolo
> >>
> >> On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 2:56 PM, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
> >>> Hi all.
> >>> The discussion of this evening brought a nice idea: since we have many
> >>> different types of users, whi not having a "first usage wizard" that
> >>> simply asks the user which profile (s)he prefers, and then starts QGIS
> >>> with only the needed menus and buttons activated? The profiles can be
> >>> easily produced via the customization menu, so this seems trivial to
> >>> implement, and can greatly help first-time users and special interest
> >>> groups.
> >>> Of course we have to have a prominent menu to re-run the wizard, and
> >>> change the choice.
> >>> Opinions?
> >>
> >> I am just afraid that with such profiles the users may forget after a
> >> while they have chosen a "first-time user" profile that disables a lot
> >> of functionality and then users will ask/complain about missing
> >> features...?
> >
> > Yes, I can see why you might want to offer some default "profiles" to control which toolbars and panels are visible, but I don't think it is a good idea to use the customisation feature to hide any functionality.
> >
> can you elaborate on why?

Here is my train of thought:

If there was a system of different profiles, I imagine they should be task oriented, e.g. "raster analysis" or "hydrological modelling" (rather than "view", "edit" and "analyse" or "beginner", "expert" and "master of the known universe").

If the profiles used the "customisation" mechanism, they would not just control which toolbars and panels are on or off by default, they would control which toolbars are actually visible in the right-click menu and able to be turned on or off there.
As well as hiding toolbars and panels, it is natural that specific menu entries and toolbar buttons would be hidden in each profile, and when a user needed a specific feature they would need to switch through several profiles looking to see if it existed, or alternatively look for it in the customisation dialog and enable it there (which would kind of defeat the purpose of the profiles).  Essentially the hidden features would be a lot less discoverable.

How would the default profiles work with user customisations (including the user simply turning a toolbar on or off)?  When a user switches to a different profile, would their own customisations be automatically saved to the first profile?  Would they be prompted to save the changes to a new custom profile?  Is this complication really necessary?

If the menus are organised into a nice logical hierarchy (as they should be), shouldn't it be easy for people to find the features they need, and shouldn't there be no need to hide features to protect people from them, because people naturally won't go into the parts of the menu that contain the features they don't need?

Does QGIS really need a system of standard profiles?  Will that actually address the things that are bothering people?  Or are other fixes or improvements required to address these?
e.g.:
- make the "customisation" feature actually capable of hiding buttons in the plugin toolbar.
- make "customisations" apply without a restart (I presume this already works on systems, otherwise I don't know what the "apply" button would be for).
- make it possible for users to create extra toolbars, and even drag-and-drop buttons between different toolbars.
- gui cleanups like the famous unified add layer dialog.
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