Project View

As a follow up on yesterday’s article about the Mentat user interface design philosophy, I’d like to talk about the Mentat Project view, our first example of this philosophy in action.

The project page provides a highly interactive view of group or individual tasks associated with a given project (a user or team can have many different projects). The view below shows the current tasks we have defined for the upcoming Mentat 2.0 release.

A team project displayed in the project view.

It is worth pointing out that pretty much everything visible on the screen is a mutable element, including the current project, the item type, assigned users, and task status displayed, and every piece of visible data associated with the task except for its database id.

Icon clutter control: A lot of sites (Basecamp and Aime Street come to mind right away) display a complete set of icons for each list element displayed. This creates a huge matrix of graphics that tends to overbalance the page and really distract from the content in question. We’ve tried to ameliorate this by only showing the controls for an item when the mouse is hovering over it. This keeps the interface clean and relevant.

“Fog of War”: Ultimately users will be able to assign their own colors and highlighting for different task priorities, but we’ve tried to pick a novel and useful approach for the system default.

In order to keep the display readable and relevant, we’ve avoided jarring font and background colors and have instead opted to make high priority tasks clear plain text. Lower priority tasks are presented in shades of increasingly lighter grey. This provides a display that is clear and easy to read: high priority tasks are plain black font, and lower priority tasks fade off into the distance, readable but not clamoring for the user’s attention.

Very high priority tasks are shown in a red font, but we tend to use it pretty sparingly ourselves.

I have prepared an extremely detailed, 30-slide screen shot series on using the Project View. This will be posted in a few days or replaced with a screen cast.

Coming tomorrow: the to-do list view

Filed under: mentat by Daniel