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Minor Usability Suggestions

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 9:50 am
by jfcarbel
On Aquire Dialog
- You show dpi scan increments by ones. Not many people are going to desire to set a dpi to something like 223. Normally settings in most dpi dialogs start at 75 and then increment by 100s. By incrementing by ones in the selection list you make it time consuming to switch from say 100 to 200. My suggestion is to increment them by 100s, that is the dpi choices in the drop down would be (75,100,200,300,400,500,600...2400). This way its quick to change to most standard dpi choices that most people make. Then allow to type into the drop down field for someone who wants a custom size.

On Image List
- Provide ability to right click on an image and get a popup menu with choices to save, remove (any operation will be executed only for image that mouse is hovering over in right click menu)
Reasoning: I often scan several images at once that may not be part of a related group and then trying to save each one via the "unselect all, select one, then go to save menu" is time consuming when a simple mouse over thumbnail, right click, and choose save is so much quicker workflow. I know some of these choices are located in menus, but it is quicker to utilize a popup menu.

Icons for quick image adjustments:
In control bar at bottom of screen next to the existing rotate icons - add an autodeskew button, rotate 180 button, and undo

Clear functionality:
If say I have 1 image selected of several in image list and I save that 1 file, I get prompted to clear the image list. From experience, I know that it will clear all the images not just the one I have selected but a new user may not and losing a ton of scan work might be enough to make them shy away from using the program. So a small usability suggestion, on the dialog have text that clearly warns the user that this will clear all images in the list. Or perhaps you clear only the selected one and as an option provide on same dialog a checkbox option to clear all images. Your assumption is that workflow for users will be to scan a bunch of images, save them all to separate files in batch, and wish to clear them. But you should not assume what a user will do with the program and especially with a function that clears all scanned work.

PDF Properties:
Thank you for adding the PDF properties feature, but I noticed that you only have these in the save options menu. While that is great to have some forced defaults, not all properties will be the same for all scans. For example, I may have several scans and each one will have a different PDF title or subject property. So it makes sense to have this as part of the save dialog. Perhaps when PDF drop down is selected it shows this fields in the dialog. It would also be a great feature if each of these properties fields including keyword would remember the last 10 or 20 typed entries and display them as a drop down selection field. Then as I process a batch of files, I can then quickly choose the last ones used for a quicker processing workflow. Also it should be mentioned that PDF provide 2 places for metadata - 1) Information Dictionary 2) XMP Metadata. Good article: http://www.pragmaticpdf.com/2009/07/inf ... adata.html

Keyword selection list:
For PDF properties or if you eventually support JPG IPTC metadata, then it would be great to see the ability for users to manage a list of common keywords (business, personal, legal, bank, receipt, medical, etc). Then on the keyword field provide a button that pops up multi-selection list that displays these user maintained keywords for users to select from.

Re: Minor Usability Suggestions

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2012 3:04 pm
by Loïc
Hello,

On Aquire Dialog
- You show dpi scan increments by ones. Not many people are going to desire to set a dpi to something like 223. Normally settings in most dpi dialogs start at 75 and then increment by 100s. By incrementing by ones in the selection list you make it time consuming to switch from say 100 to 200. My suggestion is to increment them by 100s, that is the dpi choices in the drop down would be (75,100,200,300,400,500,600...2400). This way its quick to change to most standard dpi choices that most people make. Then allow to type into the drop down field for someone who wants a custom size.
Fixed in PaperScan 1.5.0
On Image List
- Provide ability to right click on an image and get a popup menu with choices to save, remove (any operation will be executed only for image that mouse is hovering over in right click menu)
Reasoning: I often scan several images at once that may not be part of a related group and then trying to save each one via the "unselect all, select one, then go to save menu" is time consuming when a simple mouse over thumbnail, right click, and choose save is so much quicker workflow. I know some of these choices are located in menus, but it is quicker to utilize a popup menu.
Implemented in PaperScan 1.5.0
Icons for quick image adjustments:
In control bar at bottom of screen next to the existing rotate icons - add an autodeskew button, rotate 180 button, and undo
The icon is already on the top toolbar. You can also use the autodeskew by pressing Ctrl + K
Clear functionality:
If say I have 1 image selected of several in image list and I save that 1 file, I get prompted to clear the image list. From experience, I know that it will clear all the images not just the one I have selected but a new user may not and losing a ton of scan work might be enough to make them shy away from using the program. So a small usability suggestion, on the dialog have text that clearly warns the user that this will clear all images in the list. Or perhaps you clear only the selected one and as an option provide on same dialog a checkbox option to clear all images. Your assumption is that workflow for users will be to scan a bunch of images, save them all to separate files in batch, and wish to clear them. But you should not assume what a user will do with the program and especially with a function that clears all scanned work.
Behavior modified in PaperScan 1.5.0
PDF Properties:
Thank you for adding the PDF properties feature, but I noticed that you only have these in the save options menu. While that is great to have some forced defaults, not all properties will be the same for all scans. For example, I may have several scans and each one will have a different PDF title or subject property. So it makes sense to have this as part of the save dialog. Perhaps when PDF drop down is selected it shows this fields in the dialog. It would also be a great feature if each of these properties fields including keyword would remember the last 10 or 20 typed entries and display them as a drop down selection field. Then as I process a batch of files, I can then quickly choose the last ones used for a quicker processing workflow. Also it should be mentioned that PDF provide 2 places for metadata - 1) Information Dictionary 2) XMP Metadata. Good article: http://www.pragmaticpdf.com/2009/07/inf ... adata.html

Keyword selection list:
For PDF properties or if you eventually support JPG IPTC metadata, then it would be great to see the ability for users to manage a list of common keywords (business, personal, legal, bank, receipt, medical, etc). Then on the keyword field provide a button that pops up multi-selection list that displays these user maintained keywords for users to select from.
Will be probably implemented in a future release.


Hope this helps !

And as always: tahnk you for your suggestions ;)

Kind regards,

Loïc

Re: Minor Usability Suggestions

Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 7:06 pm
by jfcarbel
I am loving the new version, thank you for these changes! The speed of my workflow is much improved. Thank You!

I do notice the auto-deskew at top toolbar and I know agree and see your point that bottom toolbar just have simple functions like rotate 90 and magnify/zoom.
However, with that said there are still some options hidden in the menu that would be nice to have on the top toolbar for common quick adjustments. It might be a nice feature to allow users to put certain menu functions onto toolbar via a customize toolbar preferences option. I understand this would involve some extensive development work. So in the meantime can I request what I believe are 3 other very common adjustments to have on the top toolbar as an icon - contrast stretch, angle rotation, and erase selected area. Most home users will be scanning receipts and contrast stretch is used often for faded receipts. Also many receipts I scan, the auto deskew does not work correctly and I need to use the angle rotation feature. And its often necessary to do some manual cleanup and erase some areas. Adding just these 3 very common for most home users would really improve the work flow and usability experience for home users.
Also with modern widescreen monitors, there is more than enough room for these extra 3 toolbar icons on the toolbar.

Also the clearing of image worklist works much better now.

In regards to the metadata stuff, I look forward to this in a future release and I understand this is a more involved undertaking. I noticed that title of my thread was minor usability fixes. Being a developer I know this metadata feature is not something minor to implement. I think it just got added here as an afterthought I had when creating this post. So I do understand this is more involved. I may just create another forum thread which is specific to these metadata requests since I think its best.

I might ask that in addition to PDF that you also allow document metadata to be added to JPEG as well since some users do not use PDF for document storage and instead us PDF. Also the link in the prior comment did not work so here it is again:

http://www.pragmaticpdf.com/2009/07/inf ... adata.html

The point of this article is that Information Dictionary is legacy way to store metadata. While this is true, I do disagree with this article to not support both. Many programs including Adobe Reader display the document properties as the information in the PDF Information Dictionary. However, I believe while it is still some work that developer should sync this data to both legacy Information Dictionary and XMP.

Also with your upcoming Paperlight product it makes sense to start adding these features to Paperscan so that users data becomes rich with metadata that can be indexed and searched by your upcoming Paperlight document management product.
With that said I believe one other very powerful XMP meta data field that can be added would be "Document Index Date" and this field could store a date that is meaningful to the document. This could be anything from invoice date, receipt date, warranty expire date, etc. One other very important XMP field that could be maintained could be "Document Type" and this could be business, personal, legal, bank, receipt, medical, etc. Then in Paperlight I could ask it to show me all medical documents with a service date (stored in Document Index Date) in the last 90 days.