Re: UI design [was Owen Taylor's paper]

On Thu, 2002-09-19 at 19:11, Miloslav Trmac wrote:
> They are not functionality-critical, but may be thought of as
> performance-critical. I can read the dialog question, look at the usual
> place for the "affirmative" button (and move my mouse), and just confirm
> that the button is what I expected it to be. By essentially randomizing
> the placement of the buttons, I have to read 0.5 button more on average.

Fine make it a performancce issue...and I say at this moment in
time...having good solid applications in either desktop is a
functionality issue and trumps this UI consistancy argument.  A distro
is a set of compromises....Redhat want to give users good solid
apps...functional apps.  You want to give users a consistant UI for a
performance boost...right now those are incompatible goals and right now
I say functionality is more important than perforance.  

But even so this performance issue is pretty shallow. If you aren't
reading the buttons you shouldn't be using a gui interface.  Fine go
live in a UI consistant software environment and turn off ALL the visual
hinting like icons and text in the menus and the dialogs and just
navigate via layout...have fun.

You shouldn't be expecting things to work this way...its never going to
work this way in OSS where developers can make their own choices about
toolkits...good apps will have different UIs...until the toolkits let
you theme UI layout characteristics to change things after the
fact...yer going to see this over and over again....since there is not a
controling authority to force one way down everyone's throat.  

And besides layout hinting it a crutch for laziness and a tool for bad
habits that leads to the ignoring of information assumed to be
unimportant.  Information should not be assumed to be unimportant. 
Dialogs should not be ignored outright.  this isn't like keyboard layout
consistancy...where the keyboard is assumed to be out of the line of
sight when you are actively using it and so the keys themselves can not
provide visual clues becuase you arent looking at them when you use them
and as a result layout consistancy becomes important...we are talking
about screen layout here...elements you are suppose to be already
looking at when you drag the mouse pointer around to click on them.  Are
you so proficient at navigating a screen via mouse that you can click on
dialog box buttons to perform actions without actually having the
buttons in your line of sight?  If the whole idea is to see the button
to use it...you should be parsing the information contained in the
button's label....not tuning out out the information. Bad habits die
hard.  

-jef

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQA9iqBBrWLDmRitRZURAh09AJ9pk7E42NrM2foF0F9oIhzaDyawLwCgjM6J
WfRIX2pKo+gk2Xl6z02VuHA=
=pJPK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----