From kde-usability  Sun Nov 09 19:22:24 2003
From: William Leese <william () leese ! nl>
Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2003 19:22:24 +0000
To: kde-usability
Subject: Re: Toolbars
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=106840555723922

Henrique Pinto wrote:

>Hi!
>
>IMO, one of the biggest usability quirks of KDE is the toolbar layout of 
>most apps. Consider, for example, Konqueror. It's default toolbar contains 
>way too many icons (most of which are never used by average users), all of 
>these being incredibly small.
>
>Most users assume toolbars contain quick links to the most used 
>functionallity of an app. Right now, most of our apps contain much more 
>options than needed, and, because of default settings, they aren't really 
>"quick links", as it's difficult to find and click them.
>
>Based on Fitt's Law, I believe the better approach is using larger icons as 
>default (32x32), with text at the bottom. Enabling this at KDE right now, 
>however, will bring you more problems than solutions, since some text 
>labels are incredibly long (and translations don't help, either), and most 
>buttons end up hidden because of lack of space.
>
>My proposal here is to discuss ways by which toolbars can get better, and 
>implement these after the release of KDE 3.2 (It is madness to try to do 
>that for 3.2, IMO).
>
Something to consider would be forming smalls logical groups of buttons, 
seperating them by using sufficient spacing.

[a][b][c][d][e][f][g][h][i][j][k][l] is a whole lot harder to use than 
[a][b][c][d]    [e][f][g][h]    [i][j][k][l]

- William Leese

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