Hard to navigate
RenderQ
I've had success introducing Kitsu to my colleagues (artists). We had to put time and afford to get to understand it but in production it helped us. However I have to admin that the UI is not straightforward and it is not a pleasant experience. Our team leader straight up refuses to use Kitsu because of the interface and he said he cannot imagine using it for client review because he would have to spend time teaching the client how to use it.
And this experience was similar with everyone in our team trying to use it for the first time they were confused and I had to explain a lot. The review experience is lacking compared to something like frame.io
Frank Rousseau
Hello,
Thank you for your feedback. Can you tell us more about your expectation about the UI? Can you tell us the context in which you use Kitsu?
Kitsu is mainly designed to review hundreds/thousands of shots every week. That's why it doesn't look like frame.io. But we would benefit from understanding better what you like with frame.io.
RenderQ
Frank Rousseau Hi, I will try to bring some cases that seemed confusing to me when I started using it.
Lets take a look at Assets page. There are task and when I open the task it opens a side collumn. Closing this collumn I have to click the task again which depending on its size might be in the way. Having dedicated close X button in the corner would be nice. Then there is very small icon to go full size task detail. Now I don't know how to get back to Assets page. I would like something like return button in the top left corner. Instead I have to use the dropdown Assets. Or I have to click the task type which opens all the tasks of this type and then there is actually the arrow to go back. So this going inside detail and back to assets seems confusing to people I introduced it to.
Reviews, comments and annotations. Usually I have a set of images like 5 for example and I upload new revisions and I would like to compare these 5 images in order. See the ver 4 image 3 on left and ver 3 image 3 on right. This should already work but I don't think it does. There are problems I reported on git already.
Frame.io comparison. It works like file system, meaning every user can intuitively navigate. Drawings and writings are added as user comment which makes it more clean when more people annotate. Also allows to multiple drawings on one image. I know they are different tools with different usecases. Kitsu structure makes sense for its purpose.
Not sure if I can explain it better. I would say try to sit down with some people who never touched Kitsu and let them do I review. I have experienced showing Kitsu to five of my collegues and all of them struggled with navigating and making annotations. We worked on some projects then but we put time in it to learn it. For clients or project managers it is not alway possible to teach them how to use software and most of them do just fine working with frame.io.
So I am not sure if Kitsu is even trying to aim at this use case. Thing is I like it for what it is but I would like to be able to use it with clients and others not schooled in using it. So please don't take is as much of a critique but more of a "basic" user experience improvement idea. Not sure if helpfull, I don't have exact solutions for this but I wanted to share my opinion.
Frank Rousseau
RenderQ: Thank you for the feedback. Our todo-list is already huge but we will take time to see if we can find room to improve the things you mention.
Frank Rousseau
RenderQ: About the client, something that would help is to use the client role and prepare playlists for them. It leads them straight to the playlists.
The experience can be improved but it's better with the client role.