Last week I introduced some of the fundamental ideas behind Mentat. This week I’d like to show a few screenshots from the current Mentat build we’re using in-house and highlight some of the most important features. Over the next few days I will go into this in much greater detail, including personal and project workflow using Mentat. But today let’s just start with the basics.

User interface design philosophy

Our emphasis is on speed and clarity. Capturing a thought should be almost reflexive (which is why we are also focusing on mobile device interfaces and Jott voice integration). Finding information on a page should be simple, direct and organic.

We have tried very hard to minimize the number of visible controls on the screen at any one time. The goal is to have a page that is 100% viewable content. Controls are not presented unless the user decides that they need to use them.

Almost everything in Mentat is a label: if it can be changed, you can click on it and an appropriate control will appear to allow you to make whatever changes you require. Once you tab out (yes, that just means hitting the ‘tab’ key) of the control your changes are instantly saved via AJAX to the remote database.

A few examples

Text controls

In this example a task summary is edited and then assigned to a different team member. The user simply has to click on the task summary, make whatever corrections are required, and tab out. The revised summary is immediately persisted in the Mentat database.

Controls in display mode

Summary control in edit mode

Summary update is saved to the database by hitting tab or enter

Selector controls

Changing the task assignee is a similar process: simply click on the name of the current assignee and select the desired user from the resulting popup menu. The menu is dismissed as soon as a team member’s name is selected from the menu.

Task assignee field clicked

Task assignee menu becomes visible

New task assignee is recorded in the database as soon as a user is selected from the menu

We didn’t invent this philosophy. You can find similar concepts using Flickr or some of Apple’s web products. We have, however, seriously championed the idea and have worked hard to drive it even further.

This approach gives us the ability to make an extremely responsive user interface with great readability.

Coming tomorrow: the Mentat Project View

Filed under: mentat by Daniel