As I told you yesterday, I was really interesting in presenting you
shomyu [1] at your design clinic so that we could think about it's UI.

You can see the current UI in a video screencast [2].

The great part is that I don't even need a professionnal designer to
tell how it sucks: it's not even functional :)

As you can see on the screencast, it currently needs its own web page,
for example for the « description » part. What I want to be able to do
is to have everything in the JS map widget, so that it can be simply
included in any already existing web page (Fedora Community ? :D).

I'm quite not there yet, as functionally, the code needs this web
page. But that's what I'm working on for my next milestone. My problem
is that if I put all the controls inside the map widget, they will
take so much room that you won't even see the map any more. And that's
where I need your help.

So, following your design process you started yesterday...

• Target users:
  Shomyu is a « community mapping » web application. So it is for people
  who join online communities and other social networks. They might be
  totally non-geeky, so the interface must be really easy.

• Tasks:
  With shomyu, you should be able to:

• add / update your location on the world map [requires to be logged in]
• add / update a short description about you that will appear in
  the popup when clicking on a marker [requires to be logged in]
• look for people around you

About this part, there is one thing that I don't like in the current version:
- if I log in, then I'm in « edition mode ». If I click somewhere, it
moves my position
- if I log out, then I'm in « viewing mode ». If I click on a marker,
I can see the informations associated

But what if I'm logged in and I want to view someone's informations ?
If I click on his marker, it will move mine there... This can be
really problematic for mashup applications where you are already
logged in when you arrive on the map. So basically, « edition » and «
login » should be two different operations.

• Stories:
• Paquito just joined this great online community. He's really
  excited and wants to show the world that he is a part of it. So he
  goes to the running shomyu instance for this community and displays
  his location on the map, along with a short comment on him.
• Gertrude is an old timer in the $foobar community. She wants to
  know who is around her, so they can all go out and have diner in this
  nice little sudanese restaurant in East-Berlin. She looks at shomyu
  and sees who is around her.

• Paul leads the « Blue Cap » community. He wants to see where the
  « Consuls » are successful and where they are still a little less. He
  looks at the running shomyu instance and chooses to only display the «
  conuls » layer (there is one layer per group). Then he zooms out to
  have a global view, and sees that Iran and Cuba are really lacking
  some Ambassadors.

• Inputs:
  For story 1:

  • Paquito's login / password (unless he can authenticate against a
    global mecanism in his community)
  • Paquito's location (he clicks on the map, he doesn't type the
    latitude and longitude :)
  • a short description about Paquito
    For story 2:
  • Gertrude's location (she will simply go to her own position)
    For story 3:
  • the name of the group(s) that Paul wants to see

• Anything else ? We stopped here, so I don't know what comes next in
  the design process...

I don't know if that's a good idea to compare interfaces against other
software (one could argue that it kills originality). In any case, you
can have a look at how frappr works [3] (beware, it is flash and will
kill (hello) kitties by throwing strawberries at them each time you
view it)

Also, if you want more informations on shomyu, you can find some on
the wiki [4]. You can also directly ask me, I'd be glad to help you
help me :)

Thanks a lot.

Best regards,

[1] https://fedorahosted.org/shomyu/
[2] http://bochecha.fedorapeople.org/shomyu/shomyu-0.6.ogv
[3] http://www.fedora-fr.org/frappr
[4] https://fedorahosted.org/shomyu/wiki/AboutShomyu

Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)