The work on the new Visual Liturgy Live continues to take shape. Our development team are making good progress with plans to link the Lectionary planner into your services and a new ‘Manage my readings’ function. More about those later. However, today, we want to tell you about some re-designs of three important screens.
Part of the reason for showing these screens now is that we would love to hear your feedback. Dating back several months, we’ve shown previous versions to users before at the VL Wider Reference Panel and then again via email, we’ve knocked them around here in the office and amongst the wider team, we’ve even got some outside designers to give us their advice too.
So now it is your turn, what do you think? Please feel free to post your comments on this blog or email us at visual.liturgy@c-of-e.org.uk to let us know what you think.
In particular, please don’t worry too much about colour schemes. The colours are work in progress and may well change as the logo and packaging gets an overhaul. Ultimately you can change the colours if you want to in your Preferences so don’t worry about that. What we’re more interested in is what you think of the structural changes we’re planning to make.
So here we go. In each case, clicking on the small image will open up a new window with a full size image provided:
The Welcome screen
When you first open VL, we wanted to give the Welcome screen an update and also address one or two big issues that you had been telling us about.
Firstly, the updates. We’re planning to turn the two boxes from VL4 – Create a new service and Open an existing service – into a tab layout. It allows more horizontal space for each box and we don’t think we’re losing much because ultimately you are either creating something new or opening something you have been working on. You don’t do both at the same time. So a tab layout seems a good solution.
You’ll also notice the big box at the top which will give you the latest headlines from the ‘Live’ element of the software. New articles and updates will be shown here so that you always know what the latest information is. If you are connected to the Internet when you use VL, it’ll update. If you aren’t, it’ll show the headlines from the last time you were connected.
The Create a new service box has been re-organised as well. We’re reinstating the tree (because lots of users never found the ‘Show more templates’ function and thought that VL only had 16 templates… the contents of the Frequently Used Services category) and adding extra levels to make the categories and groupings more understandable.
Finally, you have an active lectionary plan but more about that in due course… just a bit of a tease for the moment as to what that might mean!
The Service overview
It looks quite different but there are not many real changes here. The peg people are no more. Your feedback is that they need to join Clippit, Microsoft’s little paper clip friend, on the Great Computer in the Sky and so as is the way of all pixels, they are no more.
The four boxes have been re-organized into a vertical scrollable list. On the right hand side, the space created is going to be used to provide a preview of the service as it is building. There will also be two extra tabs to get service notes and commentary as well as notes and help on particular elements of each service.
The changes here are to address a real problem with the Overview as it stands in VL4. You can’t see the text of your service as it is developing.
Detail view and service list
The service list (the left hand column of the Detail view) is always tricky because it has to try and do so much. It’s your main advanced control panel for VL so keeping all the tools handy while making it as uncluttered as possible is definitely not easy.
We’ve not made lots of changes but the current grey ellipsis button is becoming a more obvious ‘Options’ button.
When you rollover a particular item, it will tell you how many other alternatives are available so that you know how many choices you have before you click the star.
We’ve also done some re-organising of the Options menu to put the items you use most at the top of the list. The Item wizard is being re-named from ‘Edit or insert item’ to make it more obvious and various other changes are being made to, again, try to clarify functions.
Lastly, in the bottom left there is a little icon key to help people get used to the yellow buttons, what they mean and what they do.
Tell us what you think
So what do you think? Good or bad? Great or disastrous? Now is your chance to feed into the process before things go too much further down the stream and can’t be changed.
Thanks to all those who have been participating and contributing so far – we appreciate the input. Please do continue to tell us what you think. We are eagerly waiting and listening!
I think these changes are all for the better. Keep up the good work
I like the look of all this so far.
Any chance of a hymn chooser / record keeper that works like Hymnbase?
Looking good so far. One question: on the new Welcome screen’s “Create a Service” tab, does the “Browse” button just bring up the normal VL browser? If so it seems largely unrelated to creating a new service and this tab seems an odd place to put it, though it may well be a handy thing to have somewhere on the Welcome screen.
I really like the new Opening Screen design. Having Favourite Templates as part of a tree structure is really good and it should make going into All Services a little more obvious to people.
I also like the service overview, grouping things that need to be chosen seems like a really good idea and also readings and hymns. The text preview also looks very good.
Detail view also looks subtly improved. Having the Icon key will be useful and menus look good.
I am really looking forward to being able to ‘play’ with this improved front end, any chance of a beta!
Thanks for the comments – please keep it coming. To answer some of the queries:
Stephen – can you tell me more off-list about what you want to see in a hymn chooser. Email visual.liturgy@c-of-e.org.uk. If you have some screengrabs so much the better.
Richard H – the browse button does bring up the Browser. In one sense it is unrelated, but we thought it might be handy. If you read the old welcome message in VL4 it mentions it, so we thought why give an instruction to go find it when we can just give the button… but we are happy to be told we are wrong!
Richard C – there will be an ALPHA and a BETA. The Alpha is not far away actually and we won’t be publicizing it; instead some lucky people (including VLWRF participants) will be emailed and invited to download it. The BETA will be more open.
David,
> The browse button does bring up the Browser. In one
> sense it is unrelated, but we thought it might be handy.
Indeed; this place for it may be the best available, it just seemed a little odd on first inspection.
This leads me to ponder a related question about the relationship between the toolbar at the top of the VL window and the set of rather larger, labelled icons down the left hand side.
These feel like rather different things – especially with the way the ones on the left provide an alternative to using the Window menu for some things. How do you decide which icon goes where? If the browser is being (rightly) emphasised as a core tool in VL, should it have an icon on the left hand side too? (If it went there, I guess the hymns tool would need to move too, and at that point you may start to run into problems on smaller screens.)
In some ways I would feel happier with ditching the MDI interface style in favour of each open service, planner etc. having its own window and taskbar button, rather in the way Word etc. operate.
Thanks Richard, that is all really useful thinking.
I realise that this is slightly off topic or should the term be “off blog” and that something may be revealed in the future, but is there any possibility that roles and or responsibilities could have multiple people attached. This would be especially useful for dealing with preparing rotas for welcomers and intercessions.
These look like very helpful improvements and I look forward to being able to use them.
I’ve just two comments/queries on the Welcome screen: (1) I wonder if the Live News feature shouldn’t be a tick selected option on a preferences list rather than always present; and (2) I wonder if the listings of services in the Create Service list could (optionally?) be arranged alphabetically.
Thanks for the comments. Neil – in terms of re-ordering, we were planning on making this user controlled. So if you want to change the order of the templates, you can do so. Would that meet your need or would you prefer an alphabetical switch to that?