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).

[ColtonIdle]

cool. understood. i will still say that the current UI i think is pragmatic. its just hard to understand unless youve watched a video on it. hence why i think some minor update to iconography (or even switching to text labels) might be the right way forward.

anyway. love the project. cheers

[IAPBenediktZwoelfer]

"Most web-devs these days are all using modern stacks which only work in recent browsers" - I don't agree with this. Almost any UI framework works on almost every browser They all just compile in js+css. If for some reason a user decides to disable js, it's their own fault. No page today works without js and there is no reason to take that into account.

[9001]

Your definition of "recent" is different from mine -- mine is "anything newer than 2016", which means you cannot use many JavaScript features that people take for granted these days. Take arrow functions as just one example.

[IAPBenediktZwoelfer]

I don't see any issue here. If somebody uses a browser that is more than 10 years old they should expect issues 😅

In my 6 years of frontend development (4 of these with Svelte) i never registered any compatibility error from over 150k unique users (Using Sentry for error reporting).

[9001]

copyparty is commonly used on retro LANs and with retro devices, not only the internet -- thank you for proving my point btw :p

[SephReed]

I'd like to make my own custom UI as well. Who is the "UI Guy"? Can I talk to him, and get an idea of how to make my own?

[truppelito]

I'd be interested in knowing the answer to this as well!

[SnowSquire]

Hi, I'd also like to remake the UI with modern technology, I think copyparty should copy how qBittorrent handles alternate webuis, so that it would be easy for 3rd parties to innovate on the UI side. Then you also don't have to worry about being able to serve the old ui with the new ui for use with old browsers. The server owner can just choose whether they care about that.

[therapy]

Is there a branch or something similar for a new UI? Why not make it easy to collaborate on this?

[Larspolo]

#1453