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[Juanita] Spyder was created more than 10 years ago and it has had the contributions of a great number of developers who have written code, proposed ideas, opened issues and tested PRs in order to build a piece of Spyder on their own. We (the Spyder team) have been lucky to have such a great community of people contributing throughout the years, but this is the first time that we decided to ask for help from an UX/UI expert! Why? You might wonder. Having the contributions of this great amount of people has resulted in inconsistencies around Spyder’s interface which we didn’t stop to analyze until now.
[Juanita] The first phase was discussing all the problems that Isabela found in weekly meetings with Carlos, the Spyder maintainer, and Stephanie, another Spyder core developer. I created a Google drive document (which we ended up calling “The Nightmare document”) in which I collected most of the feedback that Isabela gave us. Then, I grouped this information into categories depending on whether the comments were about the interface, in general, or if they were about a specific pane. Once we agreed on a relevant problem that we wanted to address, I opened an issue on a new repo that we created in the Spyder’s organization called “ux-improvements.”
[Juanita] After many discussions, mock ups, and meetings, decisions weremade and we were ready to move onto the implementation phase. A big part of the improvements were made in QDarkStyleSheet where we did the new palette and color system for both the dark and light themes of Spyder. In my opinion, this was the hardest part of the process since it involved getting familiar with the code first and then, trying and trying again changing lines of code to change the color or style of buttons, tabs, toolbars, borders, etc…
[Isabela] First things first, it isn’t actually witchcraft even if it looks magical from the outside. How I work depends somewhat on what problem we are trying to solve, so let’s use the design of custom icons for Spyder 5 as an example. Once I had a defined list of icons to work on, I needed to spend time making progress on my own. Research on best practices for the relevant area of design is where I started; in this case, I knew we were going to be working with Material Design Icons’ specifications. After that, I did a combination of pen-and-paper sketching and working digitally based on the existing icons in Spyder and Material Design Icons while I kept note of the pros and cons for different directions. I also collected design elements as I built them so that I could make more consistent, accurate designs faster as I worked. For the icons, this included things like letters, rounded corners, and templates for the size and spacing of elements. Finally, I compared options side by side and tried them out in the interface to evaluate what designs were strong enough to bring them to the rest of the team. Then we discussed the options together.