Re: Replacing control center menus

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 20:25 +0000, Toby Smithe wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 18:16 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> > It's "fine", but I'm fairly sure that once you learned where the icon
> > was going to appear, it would usually be quicker to double-click it
> > straight away, than to move your hands from the mouse to the keyboard,
> > start typing, and (possibly, depending on the number of matches) move
> > your hands back to the mouse again to activate it.  The brain is *very*
> > good at recognising patterns (the icon+text) and remembering positions.
> 
> This might be the case: but what if it appears down beneath the visible
> section? Then the user would have to scroll, and this is definitely
> slower than typing; especially if they don't have a mouse with a scroll
> wheel (or equivalent).

Yes, I did say (in my earlier mail, I think) that Apple's 'highlighting'
only works well because you never have to scroll.  If we do require
scrolling by default, that's a fairly serious usability impediment in
itself, IMHO.

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