Re: [Usability] Better look Re: (no subject)

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 22:48 -0200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
[...]

> Calum, can this be changed? I'd suggest: "When a group of controls is  
> arranged vertically, line up the left edges of the controls (or of the  
> first control in each horizontal subgroup), and right-align labels that  
> are placed to the left of the controls."

There was argument about this (as I recall), probably because a lot
of Motif and Microsoft Windows programs left-aligned the labels.

Left-aligned labels are great if you want to add them up :-) or
they are sorted into alphabetical order and you want to scan through
them like a phone book.

Usually, though, you need to go through all the fields in any given
region of a dialogue, in order.  If not, the dialogue is probably
badly designed, and should use grouping to let people find the
area that is relevent, or a notepad widget with tabs, or simply
not have so many options!

The open look ui style guide was the first one that I saw to mandate
"colon alignment", and the results were very effective.  There are
some good examples in the book by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano.

I think this is a little off-topic...

On the other hand, attention to graphic design, and to the understanding
that the graphic design community has built up about how the human
visual perception system works and how to communicate clearly can
be very productive.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/