First user experience

[fnetx]

Hi! I’m a user researcher and slowly getting more into UX design. I have heard about penpot often in open source design communities, but now using it for the first time to review wireframes created by others.

So I went ahead and created my account. After completing the signup, I was presented with this dashboard:

I find it quite overwhelming. It is noisy and it took me a while to sort myself with the things. The thing in the bottom left looks like it calls for my attention, but it’s apparently a static thing, not a popup. The “Help us get to know you” seems the one that calls for my immediate action, but it is covered by the library thing. So I hide it.

{ media removed, as I am not allowed to create more than one media file }

Unfortunately, I’m still unable to move ahead with this form, as I cannot see all the options. It’s still hidden by the library menu. My current screen is 1680x1050 (minus some space needed for Firefox toolbars). I had to enter fullscreen in order to see that the last option is “Other”.

As a user researcher who is not really interested in creating content via penpot, I’m not sure what to choose. I don’t even remember if I chose “Product or UX design”, “Product Management”, or “Other”. In a follow-up step, I was asked which software I am familiar with. There is no option to tell “None” in a graceful way. So I chose “Other” and wrote “none” there. I never used any alternative to penpot in the past, but penpot seems to assume I am familiar with at least one of them. So far, I did only user testing and user research based on existing software, “dirty mockups” created by others (where I have no clue what they used) and literal “pen and paper” testing.

One of the steps in this form (I didn’t take a screenshot) was doing nothing at first, then suddenly skipping a step apparently. Finally, I chose some option like “Create a wireframe”, but nothing happened. After a while, my browser tab crashed, as it used about 3 GB of memory on my 8 GB notebook.

I dind’t find a way to access this wizard again to get started with a first project. I assumed it might have guided me through something. Anyway, I went ahead to see what my team has shared with me. I have one entry in “Projects”, and 2 in “Drafts”. The latter looks like this:

{ media removed, as I am not allowed to create more than one media file }

I don’t really know what “Drafts” are, or why the Mainmenu exists twice, or why one has a past time and one has a future tense. I don’t see a link to documentation.

Clicking on the “Mainmenu” to the left, I get a 404 Not Found page.

So far for today. Happy to report my next steps if you are interested in this kind of feedback.

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About the meta experience to report this: I was looking for a way to submit “raw user experience” feedback to penpot. I started looking in the software itself for a way to submit feedback. Then, I visited the website and looked from top to bottom. The navbar didn’t appear to help me. The footer was quite overwhelming with a lot of links. I skipped it and recognized the GitHub icon and went there. From there, I was looking through issues to see if the project accepts raw user feedback via issues, but it didn’t appear like this. I went on to discussions, and found the note to use community.penpot.app. I recognized this as a Discourse forum I am familiar with, but I wasn’t sure if I could reuse my credentials from my penpot account (via LDAP or Oauth2). I tried, but it didn’t seem to work, so I created another account.

I quickly found that there is a topic for raw feedback. After writing my post with 3 screenshots, an error message indicated that I can only upload at most one screenshot as a new user. So I had to remove two of them.

[fnetx]

I wanted to see if I can edit my post to add my screenshots after the fact. Doesn’t seem so, but I’ll still try to add them here.

The options covered by the hidden library box:

[fnetx]

And the drafts view:

[fnetx]

I now actually tried opening the “real” project.

I saw the visuals while watching the browser tab’s memory grow to about 1 GB. I still had some spare on my machine, but it feels weird that penpot takes more resources than e.g. collaborative document editing using Collabora Office in my Nextcloud.

I was looking around, moved something, used ctrl+z to undo it. Shortly after, the website itself reported that it encountered a problem.

I liked that it allowed me to download a report. I hope this helps to investigate the problem. Unfortunately, I cannot add it here (.txt files are not allowed apparently), so I’ll have to look for another way to reach the penpot team.

[carolina.portugal]

Thank you for the feedback. Could you send the file report to support@penpot.app?

[fnetx]

I have used the in-site form to submit the problem report. Should I still send the file? That’d be fine, I just don’t want to cause duplicated efforts

[carolina.portugal]

It’s fine via the form, thanks

[fnetx]

Got a reply from support that the project is now repaired. Thank you very much.

I signed in today and wanted to check it out. Some more experiences of mine.

• I was surprised to find an empty dashboard.
  • assumed the invite got broken or vanished and that I need to be re-invited by the creator
  • took me a while to figure out that I needed to switch from “Your penpot” to the other team
  • I guess this is useful to larger teams / projects, but in the empty state, I’m a little confused about projects, drafts and teams. I guess I expected a dashboard that allows me to jump to anything.
• Created a new file and started drawing (created a recording of it if you are interested)
  • was surprised that my first rectangle created a board, but due to the naming it was intuitive to figure out how it is supposed to be used. Nice.
  • got confused that during rotating the outline disappeared, while it stays during moving. I felt like the thing disappeared (e.g. due to a bug). Might be fine since white-on-white is probably not the expected usage anyway.
• wanted to do some basic interaction flow (as I aim for lo-fi sketching at this time, mostly)
  • the interaction design is pretty intuitive: Instruction is clear and following it is easy, launching it is fine as well
  • I got puzzled that my interaction starts at page 2 and found no way to change it
  • The icon next to board 1 kinda suggests that it starts there
  • I later found that I apparently have to rearrange the boards in the left sidebar, which I didn’t link to the flows initially
  • I will have to understand how this is supposed to be used, as I’m a left-to-right user and I expect that things to the right (which I also created later) also are later in the order. It seems like I’ll have to rearrange the full order each time going forward and that whenever I add a board to an existing project, I’ll have to move it down first to avoid the prototype with starting on my latest sketch area instead of the existing start.

All in all, I’m looking forward to using penpot for lofi clickable prototypes. I think it will work pretty well for my use case, after getting used to the page board ordering.