Hello!
I am new to ArduPilot and Mission planner I am looking for help from a subject matter expert in Mission Planner, and SITL, with knowledge/experience relating to modifying the user interface features. If you are a Mission Planner expert interested in helping it would be genuinely exciting to hear your thoughts. A hour or two of your time would make a huge difference for me.
I am looking at using Mission Planner to conduct research into how user interface design techniques can aid learnability of complex user interfaces. One technique I am looking at is ‘mutli-layer’ interface design, a type of personalised interface which modifies the visibility of interface features, e.g menu items, toolbars, buttons- based on the user and their task requirements. So, for a novice user, you might highlight/make more salient only the most important features for core tasks, only providing more advanced features as and when they need (they might select additional ‘layers’ of complexity’).
The questions I would like help with are i) Can Mission Planner UI be modified to ‘grey out’/ or highlight certain UI control components, e.g menu items, buttons (functions)? (it might be that we need a separate build for each version of the interface- thats ok ii) If so, how technically difficult might this be (i am not a developer so need expert advice/estimation here) iii) What user tasks (3 or 4 ideally) would be best to use to test (experiment) the UI changes- as an example- I think something like planning a mission (drawing a route), and launching, might be suitable- I would need discrete, sequences of interactions (think procedures to mission plan or set up the vehicle) with the UI, rather than continuous tasks such as the actual control of the vehicle. Ideally I would benefit from a brief walkthrough/tutorial of the UI to identify discrete tasks. This would then help specify the exact UI changes required.
I’m also genuinely interested to learn more about the software, as I am keen to get into UAVs myself as a hobby!
Many thanks!
Eric