Python GUI: visualise exoplanet transit and simulate atmospheric temperature

Question

I've been working on a Tkinter GUI (first try with these sort of programming) to make it as easy as possible to visualise light curves and look for exoplanet transits in TESS and KEPLER missions (these 2 in particular since the GUI takes advantage of the lightkurve python library; and I would love some general feedback. Is it unintuitive? Is it useless because you'd rather do this kind of stuff online? Is it straight up broken? I hope not and I would like to share it with you anyway: https://github.com/Britishterron/exoplanet_finder

I'm not going to paste the whole code here, since it's over 700 lines, but you can see it in the main file of the github link, alongside screenshots of the GUI and the requirements.txt for the required libraries.

Here are some pictures and the general idea:

Load a file and just click analyse (you can load all LC or TPF files from the TESS/Kepler missions from the Mast Catalogue), no steps required to show and phase-fold the light curve. (This is real data for KEPLER6922244)

Play around with atmospheric parameters to simulate surface temperature with no extra loading.

Temperature is estimated as:

Sample Product Group IDs for you to try:

Random star with no exoplanet: 27240036 (48 Mb)

Star with an actual confirmed exoplanet (star mass is like 1.15 solar masses, but default is 1 if you leave the entry blank): 602457 (942 Mb but you can cut it sooner no need for all the files...)

Answer 1

Generally, as we've seen in a lot of interfaces these days — the most important action that you want users to do would be put on the top right (on left-to-right languages). You can see this also on this very page: "Ask Question" on the top right corner, just under notifications. I'd venture that it's what users have come to expect these days.

So take your page and think about it: what would the user want to do on a given page? Would they probably want to load a file? Alright, put the button on the top right, give it a differentiated color to highlight. Next, after a file has been loaded, what is the most important identifier for that file — to ensure that the user has loaded a correct file? Maybe the star name? Put it on the top, biggest element on the list.

Next on, elements are there for a purpose. Textboxes are for items that users can edit. Your second screenshot contain textboxes, but I'm not sure that the numbers inside are editable. If they are, then good; primary action here would then be "Calculate", which is intuitively just below the textboxes.

For easier reading, perhaps move the units to the right-hand side of the numbers. There is a principle of "recognition, not recall" — make the user not have to remember things and go back and forth between pieces of information. It might be worth it to make this info list as a table. Added bonus for doing so would be making the Earth values able to be toggled right beside the exoplanet values for comparison.