Avare: New User Experience notes

[VK]

Hi,

Here are rough notes regarding my initial experience from 3 flights with
Avare 7.0.7 as a student pilot with no exposure to any prior EFB tools. I
had hoped to flesh them out before posting (and I've been discussing some
ideas with John offlist), when I have more time to engage in subsequent
discussion.

However, since I won't get to spend more time on this for a few more weeks
at least, I'm dumping as-is. If you have questions, apologies as I may be
slow to respond.

Also note that this is focused on "issues" I ran into; this is a great app,
and I don't mean to diminish the effort you've put into it.

------------------

1. My very first use involved planning a flight with someone who sent me a
text message with a list of airports. I could not copy 'n paste into the
flight plan creation field.
--> known issue with a workaround, but seems hokey and haven't
tried this since


2. The difference between 'Create a new plan' and 'Save plan' was confusing
at first. Would like to just create a plan with a name, and save it
periodically. Saving current plan doesn't work; have to constantly type in
the name, even though the text in the field suggests it can be saved with
the current name by hitting 'Save'.

3. Accidentally selected Navaids instead of Base for airports, so
navigation was to wrong points. Built an entire plan this way. Not sure
how.

4. This is unique to the bloatware installed on my Samsung tablet, but some
better insight into handoff from Avare to external HTML viewer would help:
Downloading weather caused Hancom Office viewer to be launched, but it
didn't recognise the file so it wouldn't open (said file was corrupt). Had
to disable Hancom HTML Viewer as I could find no other way to disassociate
it from .html extension handling. Then I got a choice of apps such as
Chrome to handle it.


5. When you long press an airport, you get a popup with details for that
airport. At the bottom of the screen are tabs for things like 'A/FD',
'Plate' etc. I select 'A/FD' and I get the correct details for the airport
currently selected. However, if I then select 'Plate' I get the airport map
of my last airpor. There was no plan loaded. This was in simulation mode.

6. In a flight plan, selecting different waypoints in the left-most column
results in changes to distances (in distance column and in total), but
they're not consistent (i.e. you can repeat the same steps and get
different numbers). I need to experiment with this more.

7. TRSA approach/departure frequencies not shown in the COMMs text. I flew
to a TRSA with separate App/Dep frequencies for East/West listed in the
A/FD details (which I got from AOPA). But they are not in the A/FD details
in Avare.

--> response from list was to check the actual A/FD diagram. That
works, but it would be nice to have the actual text in the COMM section of
the airport info
--> also noted that resolution is somewhat poor on a 10" tablet.
I'm told this is the result of choosing bitmaps for speed and flexibility
(drawing, tagging, etc.).


8. Portrait orientation: with my tablet and case, I needed the portrait
orientation to be the opposite of the default. Took a while to find the
right place, but eventually found the "Reverse Portrait" orientation
setting.

9. UI design: Toggle button.s Some initial confusion about whether or not a
plan is currently "active". It seems simple, but I wonder if other new
users have the same confusion at first when the toggle button for
"Active/Inactive" is pressed? For me, a button tends to imply an action.
Another pilot and I both interpreted "Active" as "Press to make active",
and "Inactive" as "Press to make Inactive". Later we realized this was not
the case.
--> Similar issue for "Tracks On" and "Navigate". The toggle between
Navigate/Simulate results in a red "Simulation" on the top right corner,
which makes it more obvious what you just did.

10. Tracks -- wanted to show someone my tracks, but hit the Tracks On
button as I was wrapping up from a flight and it saved to a KML file. Then
the tracks disappeared. It would be nice to display tracks on the map in
simulation mode even if you've just saved them.
--> I think the work around involves a few additional apps to
import KML, but maybe I'm missing something


------------------

Thanks
--
VK

[Zubair Khan]

Thanks VK
Many of these are non issues and we can help you with, but some are good points. Will reply in detail later.
Z

[Eric Brown]

I would tend to agree with you on #9 VK. The button labeling is counter-intuitive and confusing. You just sort of get used to it after awhile,
although every time I press those buttons it bugs me.

I think "Activate'  to activate the plan and "Inactivate" or "Deactivate"  to inactivate the plan would make more sense.

If there's enough room on the button in the UI I think "Activate Plan" and "Inactivate Plan" would be even better.

Eric

[John W SBA]

> The button labeling is counter-intuitive and confusing.

To me it would make sense to use more color in the UI if it's easy to
do. That would make it easier to tell setting status at a glance in
flight, especially with turbulence. Might also spiff up the look a bit.
But maybe light pastel orange/green color backgrounds would detract
from readability even with Bold font type?