Inkscpae UX

[Eneroth3]

Hello all

I've been using Inkscape for a couple of years, mostly to create icons for my SketchUp extensions. Though Inkscape is very useful I've never very much enjoyed using it due to its interface. I think there are quite a few things that could be improved to make the program easier and more fun to work with, as well as making it appear more professional. Not to mention making it more accessable.

As a 10+ years SketchUp user a lot of these examples are naturally from SketchUp, but much of this comes from other programs too.

Here are a few things I've noticed (or more accurately, have been unable not to be distracted by) in the UI. Most issues are related to noise, lack of visual hierarchy or lack of consistency, and these are closely intertwined with the latter drastically increasing the sense of noise.

Visual hierarchy among dialogs

In the left side dialog tray I often struggle to see what controls belong to what panel. The slider inputs, with their color, is more prominent than the dialog titlebars. Would it be possible to change the titlebar background color, and perhaps tune down the slider color a bit?

Noise in dialogs

I would also very much like to collapse docked dialogs when I don't use them to reduce the noise (but have them available when I need them a few seconds later). The current button things looks a bit like colalapsable title bars mixed with buttons but work like tabs but also contain a small arrow indicating a progressive disclosure and this turned into a very long sentence. It is not very clear from their appearance what these elements do, and they seem unable to collapse all dialogs. Would it be possible to some day have a tray with a series of dialogs, all colalapsable using their title bar, as SketchUp or LayOut does?


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Inkscape gets noisy ay just 2 dialogs


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SketchUp and LayOut can have 9 or 10 dialogs, and still look clean and be easy to use

Selection feedback

I often find it hard to see what elements are selected, especially when selecting multiple partly overlapping objects.

Would it be possible to tint the color of the selected objects blue (the conventional color for selection) to make it clearer what exact elements are selected? The tint could be temporarily removed when colors are adjusted to allow you to see the actual color, but come back when the color control element loses focus (as in Paint.net).


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Unclear what elements are selected in Inkscape


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Impossible not to see what is selected in SketchUp

Selection tool actions

Several CAD applications uses box select from left to right to select only what is completely within the box, while selecting from right to left selects everything that is just partly inside the box too. This is highly useful and I'd very much like this in Inkscape too.

A tool mode that adds to the selection but doesn't subtract from it, regardless of the whether the clicked object is already selected, would also be very useful, especially as it is hard to see what is already selected. In SketchUp Ctrl is used for this (and Shift toggles while Ctrl+Shift only subtracts). Maybe Inkscape already has some similar feature and it is just me who don't get it. Otherwise this would be highly useful.

Too similar visibility icons for layers

The shown layer (open eye) and hidden layer(closed eye) look very similar when you don't look close. Would it be possible to lower the opacity of the hidden icon, as shown in LayOut above, to make it possible to see what layers are shown only with you peripheral vision?

[Eneroth3]

(Continuing topic in separate post to avoid risking losing data)

Grid options

The grid tab in document proprties is both quite confusing, and a good example of how the UI could be improved more generally. When I first stumbled open this interface I immediately tried the dropdown menu to use another grid (of course it didn't work). This interface could benefit a lot from hiding inputs until they are relevant. Instead of letting the first input element you see be the the type of grid used when creating a new grid, this option could be shown in a dialog box after you've clicked Add, similar to how the name and position of a newly created layer is chosen after the plus button is pressed.

With this change the add button could be placed e.g. next to the control for selecting already defined grid, and the headers "Creation" and "Define grid" could be eliminated, making a cleaner layout without losing any functionality. The nested tabs could even be replaced with a dropdown.


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Current UI


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Possible alternative UI

Hex color code input

Currently when the hex RGBA color input in Fill and Stroke doesn't contain the alpha channel, this value is assumed to be 0. While I discovered this fairly quickly it is still annoying to have to add FF every time I paste a color code from another program that does't use any alpha value. This could also be very confusing to new users. I suggest assuming alpha to be 255 unless otherwise stated.

Resize excluding line width from bounding box

This is again a thing that might already exist, but that I haven't been able to find. I'd very much like to be able to resize objects with their stroke width ignored. Not just keeping the stroke width, but calculate the bounding box used by scale tool with strokes excluded and instead use the exetens of the underlying object. I almost never want to scale with the outer edge of the stroke as origin, but the center of the stroke/the edge of the object.

I hope this feedback is appreciated. It is not my intention to bash the current UX, but to give constructive critique.

[Moini]

It may or may not be appreciated, but this is the wrong place to ask for feedback by developers.
If you want to show them your suggestions and conclusions, you'd need to either use the developer mailing list or the bug report section.

[brynn]

Oh wow!  Maybe you'd like to join the development team, and help us with interface design.  As far as I understand, there's at least a loosely cohesive team which works on the interface.

I know that I've heard some of the things you mentioned being discussed.  Specifically a better way to manage all the many dialogs.  They already are collapsible to some extent.  I've seen people using them in videos.  I can't seem to make it work for me, so perhaps there are some bugs still to be fixed, I'm not sure.

Personally, I would not like to change how the alpha + hexcode is handled.  But then, I don't use other graphics programs with Inkscape.  But as long as the alternative doesn't create extra work, I probably would not object.

Your last item, I think already exists.  Look at Inkscape Preferences > Tools, and choose Geometric bounding box.

Yes, those darn grid options come up all the time.  And every time, after a long discussion, the decision seems to be to leave things as is, for the most part.  But still, please feel free to share your thoughts with developers.

The icons for layer visibility depend on your operating system and/or icon set.  You could actually make your own, if you want....I'm pretty sure.  Different icons come from different sources in Inkscape, so I'm not sure specifically about those.  But I think I heard that the next major version release will have an improved system for icon handling.  So I'm looking forward to that!

I haven't heard about your suggestion for direction of selection box before.  If it were optional, I wouldn't object.  It's just that I'm so accustomed to dragging that box from wherever my mouse happens to be.  I would not like to have to stop and think which way to do it.  But as an option, if it could be done, why not?

More info about bugs or feature requests:  https://forum.inkscapecommunity.com/index.php?topic=628.0