Estuary started with a discussion of how the Confluence user experience wasn't up to par with modern interfaces and needed a refresh. Here is my original post when suggesting a major shift away from Confluence.
Quote:To start out, I'd like to suggest watching the first 8 minutes or so of this video deconstructing the ideas behind material design. A quick summary is that design should be easy to understand. The user should be able to see that his or her actions clearly caused an action. The most important elements of a screen should be plainly visible. And any important actions on a screen be highlighted and colored in such a way as to differentiate.
While I don't necessarily suggest that we simply take something like the Android TV design for our own, I think we'd definitely benefit from the ideas they are pushing with material design. Also, I think we should start not with what's possible in Kodi, but with what would be preferred in an ideal environment.
I have some ideas for what I think might be nice. I may wireframe those in the next few days. A quick summary of those ideas, though, is that most, if not all, content should be as accessible as possible from the home screen. The parts of the home screen dealing with content should clearly be separated from the parts dealing with settings, system, etc. Doing something like adding a new video source should be related to existing media, if there is any, but also marginally differentiated, to make clear that you are looking at an action. Also, when you add a video source, the very first question should be a visual representation of the question "What kind of content does this source contain?" That should not be a question relagated to the end like some kind of afterthought.
Adding a source should be clear with every step, should use as much imagery as possible, and should not show windows densely packed with words. Also, once a source has been added, if it creates a home menu, like adding TV Shows for the first time, an animation should clearly show this behavior occur on the home screen.
Pretty-fying imagery should be limited, preferably existing only to better explain what's happening on the screen.
This one might be the most controversial: Selecting a piece of content should not automatically play it. Instead, it should launch an info screen where clicking again results in playing the video, but most of the available options currently found in the context menu and already existing info screen are made available to the user.
And here's the original wireframe.
What I think is really noteworthy about that initial post and the discussion that followed is that it is entirely library-centric. We went in with the idea of pulling content to the front, but that content was exclusively library content. For the damned dirty pirates
(or even just people who regularly use addons more), this actually resulted in an unexpected step backwards, because the content they were most interested in, links to their addons, went from being immediately visible to a little bit buried in menus. This is solvable by hiding the menus the user doesn't want, so addons becomes the top menu, but for people used to Confluence, that may have been confusing. And so we end up with a system that's AWESOME for library users and meh for addon users.
In retrospect, if we could do it over again, I'd probably have tried to introduce Estuary in the same release as montellese's
Media Import work, whenever it's possible to import the content of addons as well as upnp libraries. Setting aside the piracy addons, his work would make it possible to pull legit content from addons into the library, which would make for a much easier user experience. Imagine the estuary library filled with Amazon Prime and Netflix content combined together in a single interface on the home screen. How cool would that be?