Re: Replacing control center menus

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 16:40 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 15:26 +0100, �ienne Bersac wrote:
> > A menu longer that 10 entry is very painful.
> 
> Too menu preferences items is painful whether it's in a menu or a
> "shell" window. I doubt that this new UI helps much with that, though I
> haven't seen a screenshot. Combining control panels will still be
> necessary.

On that note, I'll just add my usual gripe with categorized control
center shells (including Apple's) that it's generally harder to find
things when you have to scan in three dimensions (headings first, then
top-to-bottom and left-to-right) rather than just one (top-to-bottom)--
and if you don't know what category the thing you're looking for is in,
you can add on an extra bit of scouting around.  If the shell ever needs
scrollbars as well, we're probably just doomed :)

A good search facility will help in some situations, but people rarely
head straight for the search when it looks like it should be easy to
find what they're looking for (as indeed it does in an unscrolling,
nicely-arranged window full of icons).  So by the time they've looked
for an icon and then searched instead, they might have found it quicker
if they'd just kept looking, which, by reinforcing positional memory,
would have helped them find it quicker the next time.

(That's one thing Apple's system preferences search does get right
compared to, say, Ubuntu's similarly-categorized "Add to Panel" dialog--
in the latter, things disappear and move around as you type, meaning you
don't really learn where the thing you're searching for was actually
located, which would have made it easier to find the next time.)

As others have said, there's also the question of how much sense it
makes to have to fire up a whole intermediate application just to (more
often than not) change one setting in one capplet.  (Perhaps Novell have
some good data about the typical everyday usage of capplets they could
share?)

Cheeri,
Calum.
 
-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems