I'm glad to see this new Virtualmin control panel as an alternative to cPanel, Plesk, Ensim, etc. Wish to see it getting its feet down to the web host market..

Just some feedback for the UI. The icons, design and theme are standardize enough, but I think it lacks of navigation user friendliness.

There is a field study called Human-Computer Interaction and there are some rules of where the main menu should sit on. Example, menu should be always on the left hand side, like what Plesk did. It helps a lot for new users to figure out what it's all inside. The first impression when I view the Virtualmin, I felt a bit lost. Also the text should go smaller a bit, such as 10px, or 11px.

Just some minor changes to the UI, it will give people very good impression that will drive to the success adoption.

Hey Bryan,

Thanks for your thoughts.

I'll comment a bit, though I don't disagree with you about needing some usability improvements in Virtualmin.

There is a field study called Human-Computer Interaction and there are some rules of where the main menu should sit on. Example, menu should be always on the left hand side, like what Plesk did.

This isn't a rule of HCI. It is a convention. Specifically, a convention of one Operating System (Windows XP, and it might even be a style guideline, though I have never studied the GUI guidelines of Windows XP). It does not apply to Mac OS X, which places menus at the top of the screen. Many folks consider the Macintosh an easier to use system. Also worth noting...what you're seeing are tabs, not menus, which are considered by HCI folks to generally be better than menus. But I agree that we should have a left-hand side XP-style version of the GUI for those who prefer it, and I plan to add one in the next month or two. New themes are relatively easy to create for Webmin (and thus Virtualmin), and so it isn't difficult to offer a variety of "look-and-feel" options.

The first impression when I view the Virtualmin, I felt a bit lost.

This we definitely want to do something about, though I'm not sure where to begin working. We will be doing some real useability tests over the next couple of weeks (i.e. getting non-expert users in a room, and film them trying to perform tasks in Virtualmin...we'll presumably find a lot of things that seem obvious to us that are not obvious to normal users)...But I would very much like to hear what was hard to find or understand about Virtualmin?

Also the text should go smaller a bit, such as 10px, or 11px.

I've just checked and found that we're using 10pt fonts in the body, but I shouldn't be modifying font-size at all. This is definitely a rule of HCI: don't touch peoples font sizes! So, in the next release font size will be whatever you've configured in your browser, and the headers will be scaled up based on the browser defaults. So, while I don't agree that smaller is where we ought to go with fonts, I'm glad you brought them up. We should be giving the user exactly what they've told their browser they want, not what I happen to think is readable and nice to look at.

Thanks again for your thoughts. I'm always grateful for criticism that can help us better understand the flaws in Virtualmin as it is today.