Plans for UI options

[James William Yoon]

Hi all,

We've been doing a good deal of thinking around UI options, and how to shape
it over the coming months.

The idea right now is to approach it in two phases: 1) a short-term clean-up
of the current implementation in time for Infusion 1.4, and 2) a bigger push
to move the design forward.

In the short term, we're planning to:
- Go non-modal by default by introducing a sliding panel to replace the
modal dialogue that currently exists for on-the-same-page UI options
- Make the preview area optional
- Introduce easy/easier integration into the code
- Showcase all of the above in a demo
- Have chats with some experts (Clayton Lewis, Gary Thompson) about the
history and future of UI options

After the clean-up, we're planning to:
- Take a break from implementing new features, and return to more focused
design thinking
- Goals here include (but aren't limited to): drastic reduction in the
complexity of the interaction while maintaining flexibility of preferences
underneath (e.g., by introducing a two-tier interface--good presets to get
the user close to their desired preference, and customization options to
tweak it), and introduction of user preferences for additional
interactions/modalities (e.g., closed captioning, audio supports, animation
speeds, etc.)
- I expect there'll be a flurry of design activity around this, including
some benchmarking, interviews with users and more experts, scenario writing,
wireframing, and user testing

We're pretty jazzed about the potential for UI options, especially wrt to
FLOE. Any thoughts anyone might have about UI options are always welcome.

Cheers,
James
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