Hi Allen,
I was going to try to keep my mouth shut because I use BrickSmith as a power user and thus my ideas are probably bad for new users, but...
I think it would be useful from a UI perspective to have a few (or one) broad filter button that virtually cuts the library down to a smaller number of items outside the category system. The idea would be to make the whole library appear smaller temporarily in the UI for the purpose of searching. (If this happens, then the user not knowing the category is unimportant - 'all categories' can be searched without getting 1000 bricks if "1x2" is in the search term.)
In this scheme reasonable filters might be:
- Parts having stickers and/or printing.
- Sub-parts, or anything deprecated or moved - I'm not sure how much of this shows up now.
- Parts belonging to clear building subsets (e.g. duplo).
With a small (or one) filter, the user could toggle between "the kitchen sink" and "normal stuff" pretty easily. I would hope that users have a good intuition as to when what they are looking for is normal or weird.
(When my brother and I were young and had real legos, we specifically put the weird/useful/rare pieces into a separate box - hinges, rare windscreens, tiles with printing, slope bricks with computers, etc. If an eight year old can do it, maybe a new user can too. :-)
cheers
Ben
I was going to try to keep my mouth shut because I use BrickSmith as a power user and thus my ideas are probably bad for new users, but...
I think it would be useful from a UI perspective to have a few (or one) broad filter button that virtually cuts the library down to a smaller number of items outside the category system. The idea would be to make the whole library appear smaller temporarily in the UI for the purpose of searching. (If this happens, then the user not knowing the category is unimportant - 'all categories' can be searched without getting 1000 bricks if "1x2" is in the search term.)
In this scheme reasonable filters might be:
- Parts having stickers and/or printing.
- Sub-parts, or anything deprecated or moved - I'm not sure how much of this shows up now.
- Parts belonging to clear building subsets (e.g. duplo).
With a small (or one) filter, the user could toggle between "the kitchen sink" and "normal stuff" pretty easily. I would hope that users have a good intuition as to when what they are looking for is normal or weird.
(When my brother and I were young and had real legos, we specifically put the weird/useful/rare pieces into a separate box - hinges, rare windscreens, tiles with printing, slope bricks with computers, etc. If an eight year old can do it, maybe a new user can too. :-)
cheers
Ben