The quality of life improvements for the canvas UI over the years made the experience for this year’s canvas event incredible! I virtually had no complaints for the core features save for the buggy pixel cooldown timer, which was fixed later on. The best feature about this year was the addition of cursors, which really brought the canvas to life, plus it helped strangers coordinate with the pixel placements and also communicate with each other through gestures.
Here are my suggestions for improvements for the next year’s canvas event:
Make the template feature more intuitive: The current UI for adding templates through the URL was not obvious initially. Ideally the cotemplate feature should be integrated with the canvas UI instead of being in a separate webpage. If not possible, then at least add an option to display a short guide on using templates.
Allow non-team members to access other teams’ templates: It was difficult assisting other users with their art since I didn’t have access to their template (or I didn’t know that I did). Even if I’m not in a team, I should at least have a read-only access to use other teams’ templates on my own. It’s only after the event finished that I got to know that I could’ve used other teams’ templates after all, even though I did spent considerable time in the website trying to figure out how. I guess this should be clubbed under 1.
Add coordination-centric reactions for cursors: The cursor reactions feature could be extended so you could communicate with other users directly with your cursor for coordination without actually having to text others. You could add emojis like thumbs up, thumbs down etc, tool icons like pencil, erase, fill etc, and even directional symbols like arrows pointing vertically, horizontally, diagonally etc.
Add option to only place pixels on left mouse click: It was only later in the event that I realised that I was placing pixels even while right-clicking which I had reserved for moving through the canvas, wasting pixels in the process and possibly littering other users’ art. It would be better to have control over how pixel placement has to be triggered.
The quality of life improvements for the canvas UI over the years made the experience for this year’s canvas event incredible! I virtually had no complaints for the core features save for the buggy pixel cooldown timer, which was fixed later on. The best feature about this year was the addition of cursors, which really brought the canvas to life, plus it helped strangers coordinate with the pixel placements and also communicate with each other through gestures.
Here are my suggestions for improvements for the next year’s canvas event:
Allow non-team members to access other teams’ templates: It was difficult assisting other users with their art since I didn’t have access to their template (or I didn’t know that I did). Even if I’m not in a team, I should at least have a read-only access to use other teams’ templates on my own.It’s only after the event finished that I got to know that I could’ve used other teams’ templates after all, even though I did spent considerable time in the website trying to figure out how. I guess this should be clubbed under 1.I did find myself wishing for a thumbs up reaction or something like that it would be very handy indeed!