User:Gaia.clary/UI Exporters

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Using the Export Panel

I repeatedly get reminded about an inconvenience that apparently confuses new blender users, that is the location of the export options panel. Here is a summary of my observations about this topic.

Please do count this as an attempt to collect the issues and point to them, not an attempt to complain about them. I hope this helps a bit when it comes to evaluate how the user interface can be improved.

So, when i open the export panel (of any exporter, i used the Collada exporter here), then you get presented with a screen similar to:

Admittedly my computer has assigned a lot of disks, so the System tab is rather long. However i want to point to following issues:

1. The export options panel (on the lower left side) is partially discarded. About screen size see at end of this article.
2. The Operator Presets never displays which preset Is currently active.
3. The export options panel resides diametrical to the Export OK button. So they couldn't have been placed further away from each other :)

Now also keep in mind that in most cases you select the exporter from

  File -> Export -> <export_type>

This selection is in the top left corner of the blender main screen. So we can assume your mouse is somewhere in the top left corner of the screen when you enter the export panel.

Now lets look at what a user most probably will want to do once the export panel has opened:

Select the export location

Focus points

• System
• Bookmarks
• Recent panels
• main canvas section
• header section (to specify the file name)

Remarks

• The focus points are distributed over the entire screen.

Set export options

Focus points

• The export options panel in the lower left corner of the screen

Remarks

• The panel is partially hidden. in worst case it could even be fully hidden.

Do the export

Focus Point

• The export Button in the upper right corner of the screen.

"Dancing the Collada"

I took a moment and checked what exactly i do when i do an export. Look at

The green lines show my mouse movements over the screen. And this is what i was doing:

• My first move is to the Recent tab, where i select the tmp folder.
• Then i do NOT move further down to the options, because i am currently about setting the filename. So i step upwards to type in my new file name
• Now i am done with this, so next set the options, so i step down to the export panel and can not see if the correct preset is selected already. So just to be sure i select the preset again.
• But i am unsure if the selections areall good, better check them. So i move up again to scroll the Tool Shelf down a bit
• Then i check the options
• and finally i step up to the export button.

Ok, this is how to dance the Collada :)

Observations

And here are some observations that i collected over the last 3 years while i was helping fresh blender users to get at least somewhat familiar with Blender:

• The export panel is often overlooked. Many people are fully unaware of it until they get pointed to it.
• Even when the panel is known many people ignore it as they believe the default options already work well for them, while this probably is never the case. Thus the export options panel is probably the most important focus point of all.
• The presets selection is often not recognized as a convenient way to prepare the selection for a specific export situation.
• The statistically most used screen of size 1024*768 seems to be also used by many fresh users who possibly just have started 3D and are not yet aware that this screen size might be a bit too small for their task.

And this is my final subjective opinion:

When we assume that most people read from left to right and from top to down, then the export panel might be placed at a corner with low attention.