In my previous post, I told you about the contact I had with the OpenUIThemes’ staff and said that a test was scheduled.
Well, yesterday, I could get my hands on their themes. My review below, I had access to their Gmail Theme and every major topic I tested is listed here:
Design
o Being a daily user of Gmail as well as a global Google fan, I could feel the impression to work on my desktop using their test machine.
o The UI is easy to navigate and the visuals are ok.
o Some menus have changed position (like sitemap and so on) but as a user you don’t want to use this menu every day. In fact thinking again about it, I think that it adds something to user navigation as UI is focused on what will be immediately useful for the Siebel user.
Performance
o Performance was fine on this theme, the theme did not contain heavy images but I was on a low-bandwidth connection so for me it’s OK. I don’t know how it would behave with more and heavier visuals (high-definition logo of a company, etc...) but maybe high-bandwidth connection will compensate in this case.
o Navigation is fluid between the pages and response time is also, even on first connection to the Siebel environment.
o I didn’t try to make performance-costly operations specifically so I can only say that the UI performed well with basic operations and navigation.
Compatibility
o As you can imagine, this is my major concern (as I point out in some articles where I present webkit properties implementation for example), I try to draw attention on this point everytime I can when customizing the OpenUI.
o So I tried with IE9, Chrome and Firefox (I don’t have Safari and Opera installed so I couldn’t test it with these browsers). They state on theme pages that they support Opera and Safari also but I can’t confirm that.
o The result is same in 3 browsers I tried. Apparently, they took into account the difficulties to make customization depending on different browsers.
The theme I have tested is OK on design (depends on your taste actually), performance and compatibility as far as I could test it.
So this is a great news to see some companies going along with the OpenUI product expansion. Check it out yourself at http://www.openuithemes.com
Apparently, they also offer Plugins to modify the user experience.
They presented me 2 examples and also offered me to test it for free. They told me that other plugins are like I already did for voice recognition in Siebel OpenUI, mouse hover info, applets layouts changes and so on but I don’t know much more right now.
Well, yesterday, I could get my hands on their themes. My review below, I had access to their Gmail Theme and every major topic I tested is listed here:
Design
o Being a daily user of Gmail as well as a global Google fan, I could feel the impression to work on my desktop using their test machine.
o The UI is easy to navigate and the visuals are ok.
o Some menus have changed position (like sitemap and so on) but as a user you don’t want to use this menu every day. In fact thinking again about it, I think that it adds something to user navigation as UI is focused on what will be immediately useful for the Siebel user.
Performance
o Performance was fine on this theme, the theme did not contain heavy images but I was on a low-bandwidth connection so for me it’s OK. I don’t know how it would behave with more and heavier visuals (high-definition logo of a company, etc...) but maybe high-bandwidth connection will compensate in this case.
o Navigation is fluid between the pages and response time is also, even on first connection to the Siebel environment.
o I didn’t try to make performance-costly operations specifically so I can only say that the UI performed well with basic operations and navigation.
Compatibility
o As you can imagine, this is my major concern (as I point out in some articles where I present webkit properties implementation for example), I try to draw attention on this point everytime I can when customizing the OpenUI.
o So I tried with IE9, Chrome and Firefox (I don’t have Safari and Opera installed so I couldn’t test it with these browsers). They state on theme pages that they support Opera and Safari also but I can’t confirm that.
o The result is same in 3 browsers I tried. Apparently, they took into account the difficulties to make customization depending on different browsers.
The theme I have tested is OK on design (depends on your taste actually), performance and compatibility as far as I could test it.
So this is a great news to see some companies going along with the OpenUI product expansion. Check it out yourself at http://www.openuithemes.com
Additional note:
Apparently, they also offer Plugins to modify the user experience.
They presented me 2 examples and also offered me to test it for free. They told me that other plugins are like I already did for voice recognition in Siebel OpenUI, mouse hover info, applets layouts changes and so on but I don’t know much more right now.
