Developing An Incredibly User-Friendly Skin

[editordesign]

Hello everyone,

I've been a graphic designer, specializing in graphical user-interface, user-experience, and quality-innovation design for roughly five years. I've used Mumble as a method of maintaining fast and efficient contact with my clients and colleagues after having too many bad experiences with Skype and other VoIP applications, and I've been consistently pleased with the user-friendliness and simplicity of Mumble compared to "similar" products like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. So why would I be making a post about designing an even more user-friendly interface? Well, there are things that could A) Be visually more sophisticated and updated, B) Be more user-friendly and offer a superior user-experience, and C) Have more continuity, design-wise, between the mobile application and the computer application, across all platforms.

Have other people done this already? Sure! Have they succeeded? Absolutely! However, I want to take on a larger scale project that completely renovates the design, upgrades it, and restores continuity across all platforms and devices. Speed, user-friendliness, and beauty are the utmost priorities in such a project, and will always be taken into consideration with even the smallest details.

So, what does this have to do with you? Well I want to hear your opinions and suggestions. What have other skins failed to offer in terms of features, styles, customization, and so on? Your opinions matter the most in a project of this magnitude, and I want to please every one of you, even among the first version release! Nothing will ever be perfect, and nothing ever is, but I will strive for perfection. I want this to be an effort between me and you, and you need to collaborate with me by giving me an ample amount of ideas so I can offer the best experience to Mumble users everywhere.

Thanks for your time, and I hope to see this project move forward as quickly as possible.

Yours truly,

editordesign

[Guest]

A lot of us here are geek. I'm more technical and I've been computing since the early 90's. I really like a simple basic interface. I actually love the default Mumble interface and I can't image a better UI. Maybe a black background with green text to simulate an early terminal or home brew computer.

But I do agree there could be some very interesting designs for the layman or newbie on modern UI computing. UX is very important.

Steam skins are interesting. Steam Metro is one I think of. Perhaps stylizing it to an operating system modern UI.

[Carbonis]

In my opinion there's a major issue regarding most of the Mumble skins: not everything is easy to see (text on channel/user comments, links, check marks...). Some days ago I've tried Mumble 1.2.8 Stable on Ubuntu and it was not possible to see user/channel comments even on the default skin.

BTW my favourite skin would be something easy to see also when it's late night or early morning (that's why I'm not using the white default one).

[hacst]

If you haven't already you might want to take a look at the 1.3 snapshots (for ubuntu we provide a PPA you can install them from if you want). They ship with a new light and dark theme. Maybe one of those is to your liking. They are derived from https://github.com/xPoke/MetroMumble/releases which became our official default theme.