I’ve been thinking a lot about the testing I did with my family over the weekend. They are Windows users and probably touched a Mac for the first time. To be honest, they are not ideal testers for my application. But still, I think it was necessary and it helped me to discover some issues:

1. Although I display a user guide when opening a new document, it’s not very clear for new users that they can drag the “+”. They simple press and release it.
2. Selecting + from the toolbar and hitting + on the canvas behaves very different. Testers didn’t mention it, but I think this is not a very clean solution.
3. When reconnecting a node testers often released the node when mousing over the node. They thought this would reconnect them.
4. When selected, a node and it’s branch are drawn with a blue shadow. Testers thought that they can only move the node when grabbing the branch. This resulted in trying to grap the branch at any point - which doesn’t work - and they didn’t realize that they can also grab the text to select the node.
5. It was also not very clear when the node was in edit mode (editing the node text).
6. When nodes are overlapping it’s not very clear which node got selected.

Possible Fixes (not in the order the issues appear above):

1. I’m thinking about changing the selection indicator to a more Desktop/Finger like approach. I like the way the focus looks when reconnecting nodes. I’ll try to use a similar indicator for selected nodes. This is probably something I have to implement, before I can see if it works.
2. Selected nodes should be drawn over all other nodes. There is also a bug with the drawing hierarchy and reconnected nodes. So I’ll have to rewrite this code anyway.
3. When dragging a node over an other node and connecting is possible, they should connect when the user releases the button. But the subtree shouldn’t stay at the released location. It should move to a more optimized location.
4. I’m thinking about drawing a border around the title to indicate that the text can be edited when in editing mode.
5. Pressing + in the toolbar, pressing + on the canvas and creating a new node via the keyboard will resulte in the same node location.