Sorry for responding to relatively unimportant usability details rather than to the core of what must be a tremendously difficult project. But as one purpose of this app is to showcase your work, perhaps my feedback isn't completely useless and certainly not meant to offend.
When I open the home page, I see almost nothing right out of the gate. There's no contrast at all. It's all tiny dark symbols on a vast black back background. After I let my eyes adjust for a bit, I see an empty timeline with absolutely no indication of how to load anything into it. I tried closing the timeline by clicking on the X in the upper right corner, but nothing happens.
Clicking on some faint squares in the upper right produces more nested panes. Contrary to the main pane they do have a menu (with labels, which is great). Clicking on the text menu produces uneditable example text in that pane. Hovering the mouse over the example text makes a plus icon appear. Clicking it creates a big red bar below the timeline in the original pane. I can change its size horizontally, but I can't find a way to enter any text.
I think someone who works with video editors a lot wouldn't be quite as confused by this user interface as I am. But a web app like this is probably aimed at casual users like me.
So my suggestions are:
a) More contrast! If you absolutely must do dark mode then you must also make everything on that black background big, fat and very bright, or people like me will think they just turned blind.
b) Better discoverability! All those tiny faint controls that appear only when the mouse is hovering over them are making it extremely hard for video editing newbies like me to understand what's going on.
c) Do some more testing. Besides not being able to enter any text, the plus icon in the text editor that normally produces those red bars stopped responding for me after a while. Refreshing the page brought it back to life.
I'm using Chrome on Mac with a not too great external monitor, which might make some of the contrast issues worse than it would appear to others.
I just want to push back on the contrast part -- you'd be right for most apps.
But video editing requires a dark interface with low contrast, so that it doesn't disturb how you see the video itself.
If you're working on a relatively dark nighttime scene, then bright UX icons would be kind of blindingly bright and impair your ability to work with the footage.
Just look at the interface for something like Adobe Premiere and see how dark and low-contrast it is. It's that way for a good reason.
The usual visual accessibility concerns simply don't apply here because if you have vision problems then video editing is probably not something you do in the first place. In the same way that DAWs (digital audio workstations) don't have accessibility features for the hearing-impaired.
My eyesight is fine. What I'm thinking is that you can't do low contrast, very fine lines (1px) and very small text all at the same time. The lower the contrast, the broader the strokes have to be.
But as I said, the contrast may well be sufficient on a MacBook display while being unreadable on the lowish end monitor connected to my Mac mini. It's certainly not a setup that anyone would do professional video editing on, but casual users may well try.
Appreciate the detailed feedback and yeah sorry for those issues, I kind of wanted to make it raw for now to leave to test just the core features so i tried perfecting that, I mean I could make it more beautiful and all but I dont have infinite time -- in the end im trying to get a job with it and work on it on the side because its open source so I know I wont get any money out of it at all, so I aimed to make core features not to bugged out and show it as it is, but still you feedback is very helpful, like best I've got so far, so im saving all you said and surely I will improve it the way you said
> I could make it more beautiful and all but I dont have infinite time -- in the end im trying to get a job with it
My two cents only, and this is meant to be constructive criticism. Precisely because you are trying to land a job with this I think you should try to polish as much as possible.
As an employer I’d probably get a better impression if someone shows me a less ambitious project, but one where attention to detail shines everywhere, rather than a more ambitious project that looks “half cooked”. The message I am looking for is “I can do things well, and I care” and for me that is more important than the size of the project.
Of course I am aware that this is completely subjective.
yeah I know... I had attention but too much to core features but not exacly the ui, I knew ui is flawed, honestly I thought its not as bad as it seems to be, but those feedbacks opened my eyes and so maybe I will try managing to have some more time to polish it, I mean now after this much recognition on this post I really started reconsidering where I want to go with this project ...
In my experience, employers aren’t really impressed by “I made this project so you’d give me a job”, they’re impressed by living breathing projects with actual users which solve an actual problem.
When I open the home page, I see almost nothing right out of the gate. There's no contrast at all. It's all tiny dark symbols on a vast black back background. After I let my eyes adjust for a bit, I see an empty timeline with absolutely no indication of how to load anything into it. I tried closing the timeline by clicking on the X in the upper right corner, but nothing happens.
Clicking on some faint squares in the upper right produces more nested panes. Contrary to the main pane they do have a menu (with labels, which is great). Clicking on the text menu produces uneditable example text in that pane. Hovering the mouse over the example text makes a plus icon appear. Clicking it creates a big red bar below the timeline in the original pane. I can change its size horizontally, but I can't find a way to enter any text.
I think someone who works with video editors a lot wouldn't be quite as confused by this user interface as I am. But a web app like this is probably aimed at casual users like me.
So my suggestions are:
a) More contrast! If you absolutely must do dark mode then you must also make everything on that black background big, fat and very bright, or people like me will think they just turned blind.
b) Better discoverability! All those tiny faint controls that appear only when the mouse is hovering over them are making it extremely hard for video editing newbies like me to understand what's going on.
c) Do some more testing. Besides not being able to enter any text, the plus icon in the text editor that normally produces those red bars stopped responding for me after a while. Refreshing the page brought it back to life.
I'm using Chrome on Mac with a not too great external monitor, which might make some of the contrast issues worse than it would appear to others.
Congrats to actually releasing something!