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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: [RFC] Icon control page, updated
From:       "Torsten Rahn" <tackat () suse ! de>
Date:       2002-08-27 5:04:03
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> tabs are not a good solution, they are a good compromise.

Depends on what you are using them for. For settings which are logically
cleanly seperated they are usually a good thing. That's why you find so many
of them in settings-dialogs of any common operating system.

> tabs decrease usability by introducing modes to the dialog.

I don't see how they introduce something bad in this example. Could you
explain that in detail?

> all the better. in this case we don't have an overload of options, and
animated
> icons or the size of icons are not (IMO) any more advanced than changing
the icon theme.

They are something that the user mostly doesn't need to change: Judging from
experience by far most users are interested in changing the icon themes. The
size is something that is set to a very reasonable value anyways.

> those items that are advanced are on a seperate dialog (icon effects)

> when will this be happening?

This should have already happened for the current release. But you always
should expect that a dialog will be extended a bit due to an added feature
in general. Otherwise you will see that once you have more or less
successfully redesigned a dialog someone will add a feature and you can
start over again as you had optimized the whole stuff for space and now the
whole dialog looks completely overcrowded.

> also, looking at the new dialog, it is actually smaller than the current
one.

Well, this is also true in a certain way for the new Background dialog which
I have discovered when I updated CVS recently.
There you can see what happens when one tries to squeeze everything on one
page.

- Visually it looks bad because you _see_ that someone tried to squeeze
everything on one page.
It's completely non-obvious that making changes to the little inconsiderable
combobox up there affects the settings in all the other groupboxes.
Also as a direct result from the "squeezing" the dialog lacks something that
one would call "white space" in DTP slang. This makes it visually quite
unpleasing and also has the very same effect that you see for pages that are
squeezed with text: You don't want to read them and don't want to touch them
in any way. So psychological this is a bad thing  as it will make Michael's
mother
say "this looks complicated, it's too much information at once, do I really
have to deal with it?"
and she will leave. Of course the whole layout would please the powerusers
as they can access everything on one page. But taking into account that you
only have to touch the whole dialog once in a lifetime this doesn't hurt
much - so _guiding_ the user instead (which also might involve clicking
multiple times) makes much more sense than loosing the people by confronting
them with the whole issue.

- Of course I'm also sure that this dialog will create a lot of headaches
for the translators.
- The logic: I already mentioned the top-most combobox. Why is "Program" in
the "Colors" Groupbox? This makes no sense to me ...

I see the point of not using tabs in this very example. So ... I would
suggest to replace the Blending, Balance, Switch Image, Image order and
perhaps even the Positioning part into one "Advanced" button. Of course it
would look stupid and perhaps even misleading if one had two "Advanced"
buttons so a better description would be appropriate. Anyways this would at
least reduce the clutter. Still the Preview monitor would look a bit bad in
that particular position. That's a problem which would still have to be
solved.

> this does not need to be shown for each theme, of course. just the
currently
> selected one, at most. perhaps a simple list box with the them name and
when
> you click on it a text label to the right of the list shows the details
for
> that theme.

Yes that would be a nice solution. Also take care that this will happen for
all other themable stuff and that this part of the interface will look the
same in terms of layout in every other place to make recognition easier.

> do you recall what the thread was called or what list it occured on? a did
a

As I already mentioned there were multiple threads. I already pointed at
some of them (I do recall that there were more though). Unfortunately the
archives are hard to search - and this is especially bad for usability
discussions imho.

>  Theme = Widget Style + KWin Style + Icon Style + Color Style

good solution imho. (one of the rare occasions where I agree with Neil ;-)
scnr

Tackat













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