Designing a component for Joomla is not an easy task. For Komento, we had to make sure that the design is appropriate and easy to use for Joomla users around the world. The development team is focused on building an engaging user interface, in the hope of delivering users a great experience.
Komento's comment form is an integral part of the component itself. From here, your users will know the total number of characters that they have keyed in, tag their locations and with the power of BBCode, your users can do more than just plain text inputs. We have even integrated anti spam functions to control inappropriate replies with Captcha, flood control, word censoring, and Akismet in the comment form itself.
Recently, we added a new feature that allows users to insert Attachments. I have been assigned to improve this function to work even better. So lets take a look at the previous design, as shown below.
Overall, I assume that every user will understand what is the purpose of each section and knows how to use it, but then again, I could be wrong.
Putting on my bigger thinking cap and with some tweaks, here's how it looked.
As you can see, the attachment table is simple for users to understand on how they want to manage it later. But still, there are some room for improvements for this, for example, the Attach File button should not be in the middle of attachment table and the text editor -- users might miss out this function later. I have to say that the information design approach is direct and easy to follow, and with some touch-ups, we can restructure this information better.
So here is the comment form design AFTER the makeover.
In terms of organization, I tried to make it look as good as before the makeover structure. With box-to-box touch, I managed to make every section feel related to each other, organized and even simplified the overall viewing of the attached files.
In the new layout tweak, Komento users will find attaching images, documents and videos a breeze to use. After all, free Joomla components doesn't necessarily mean inferior products. Well, not at StackIdeas, for sure.
What do you think? Happy commenting!