.. _improving-interface:

Orthanc Explorer is not user-friendly enough for my use
=======================================================

Orthanc is designed as a lightweight service for medical imaging,
where the word *service* must be understood in the sense of
`service-oriented architectures
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture>`__.  As
a consequence, Orthanc is conceived as a robust back-end server
(command-line) that aims to provide the most simple and generic
support of DICOM. To state it differently, **the primary focus of the
Orthanc project is not on the user interface**.

However, Orthanc comes out-of-the-box with :ref:`Orthanc Explorer
<orthanc-explorer>`, its default Web user interface. **Orthanc
Explorer is designed for administrative, low-level purpose.** It is
also used by the development team to test the features of Orthanc as
they get introduced in the REST API. Orthanc Explorer is mainly
targeted towards an English-speaking technical audience (notably
system/network engineers, `PACS
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_archiving_and_communication_system>`__
managers, medical physicists, and researchers).

**Non-technical audience** (physicists, patients, administrative
staff...) **might expect an user interface that is more user-friendly
than Orthanc Explorer**, and/or that integrates more features (such as
language translations, sorting resources, access control lists,
tagging images, beautiful layout, tunable anonymization, modification
of instances, paging if many patients, handling of timeouts...). If
you need such a more advanced `user experience
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience>`__ so that Orthanc
better fits your clinical workflow, you will have to develop a
separate, custom Web interface on the top of the :ref:`rest`, maybe as
a `plugin
<https://github.com/jodogne/OrthancContributed/tree/master/Plugins>`__. Any
front-end Web developer could take care of this task using well-known
JavaScript frameworks (such as Meteor, AngularJS, Ember.js...).

It is possible that an official plugin that provides a more advanced
user interface will be developed in the future (provided we find
funding for this development). In the meantime, you can also contact a
company that provides **commercial support on the top of Orthanc** and
that might have developed an advanced user interface. Currently,
`Osimis <http://osimis.io/>`_ is the only company ensuring such
corporate services, but others might show up in the future. A `contact
form <http://www.orthanc-server.com/orthanc-pro.php>`_ is available on
the official Web page of Orthanc.

**Update (2017-10-03):** A team of Master students from `ULiège
<https://www.uliege.be/>`__ is currently working on creating a
revamped version of Orthanc Explorer. You can get in touch with them
on the `public discussion forum
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/orthanc-users/oOyKTmfs-J0/B6eyBJcvCAAJ>`__.