My friends find the UI unintuitive

[SinTan1729]

Hi! I've shared a few folders for my friends to upload stuff to. They can make it work after I tell them how to upload, but every single one of them found it unintuitive. It might be useful to make the icons more newbie friendly, especially for shares. For example, make the upload button look like a big plus sign, or maybe like a folder with an upwards arrow. I'm not sure what's the best choice, but the current ones don't seem to be the best. Also, it might be nice to emphasize the upload option for shared folders. (It already is for write-only shares, but it'd be nice if it works for all shares. Maybe make it an option?)

Of course, I don't want to tell you what's best for your app, just letting you know about my friends' experiences. Thanks for making this really cool project.

[9001]

thanks for the feedback! It's probably no surprise that I'm mostly a backend guy by trade, so the current UI is definitely a case of "I'll make this work, and probably also efficient, but there's no way I'll be able to make it good" :>

But I have some good news -- another person who also found the current UI confusing happens to also be an actual UI/UX guy, and he figured he'd take the problem into his own hands... so it sounds like we'll be getting a full remake at some point soonish :>

there's no time estimate or anything, since both of us are doing this just for fun - with some luck it stays fun long enough to be finished. And I hope it does, 'cause it would be REALLY COOL to have an actual UI by someone who knows what they're doing xD

the plan is to keep the current UI as a fallback for old browsers, and to prefer the new one for evergreen ones (I think).

but that said, I'm definitely still open to suggestions for the current UI, I just really don't have an eye for it myself -- specifically for uploads, the current button was my attempt at communicating that the best way to upload is by dragging files/folders into the browser, since that makes it possible to use the best browser-API for grabbing the files. Clicking the button to upload isn't as good, since that uses a different, less-powerful API, especially so in slightly older browsers (at least these days it grabs the files recursively, that wasn't always the case).

[SinTan1729]

Hey, that's actually great news that someone has decided to update the UI. I totally understand how hard it is to design an UI as a backend guy. I've struggled with it for my own projects, and to this day avoid writing any frontend code if I can. (Heck, I can't even suggest a better alternative here.)

The drag and drop works, but there's no obvious indication that it would until you try to drop something. This, I think, is why they got confused. Also, some of them tried uploading from a mobile device, and that made things worse.