From kde-usability Mon Feb 18 13:16:58 2002 From: "Aaron J. Seigo" Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 13:16:58 +0000 To: kde-usability Subject: Re: optionitis X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=101408397223230 hi... > for accessibility. But having it just for these two buttons is pretty odd. > Note that, for example, you can't change the width of the panel applet > 'handles' that open the relevant menu. If one, why not the other? your obsessing about this hide button size thing. ;) the technical answer is that the applet handles are drawn completely by the style in use while the hide button size is controlled by the panel ... this could be made better ... but saying "KDE suffers from featuritis!" implies that this sort of situation is overly common. i don't think it is. rather i think the configuration dialogs are often confusing, cluttered and designed from a developer's viewpoint of the feature groupings as opposed to a user's viewpoint. kicker's configuration dialog is something of a mess, but the great majority of the features in it are quite useful. it just needs a massive face lift. i think that we are in basic agreement here, except what you call "features" i call "configuration dialog options". > Hmmm. Are you sure about that? I would be surprised if many end users cared > either way. yes, real world usability tests! we NEED this data badly. otherwise all we can do is guess. > This loses fine-grained control. But it makes sense to my Mum. Whereas > asking users to parse audiocd:/, man:/, https:/ and so forth is quite a big > demand. i thought the same thing first time i saw this dialog. we're not talking featuritis here but, once again, a poorly designed configuration interface. or rather, a configuration interface as designed by a developer. the underlying feature should remain, but the interface to the feature should be tweaked. > Well, you don't have to have an on-off value. I think a really good example > of the right way to do this is the initial KDE configuration dialog, with a there was a HUGE thread on kde-devel regarding this last month. a single slider is not enough to gauge all these things since there are so many variables involved. increasing the number of sliders helps, but you start edging towards complexity without really learning enough to make rational decisions. > The "Mouse" kcontrol module also seems good. read the email posted earlier today about the Mouse kcontrol. it isn't that great. -- Aaron Seigo _______________________________________________ kde-usability mailing list kde-usability@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability