Re: User interface suggestions

[Michael Beurskens <beursken uni-duesseldorf de>]

> Never used those systems, but sounds like tooltips (or bigger).

Well, it's a bit different. Those Help-Bubbles are a new feature of the Windows 2000 UI (ToolTips - in the sense of mouseover-popups - were actually in Windows for a very long time, since Windows 95 and in Office since Word 2.0). 

The idea is when something "new" happens to the user to show him in place what happened, why it did and how to turn it off.
Unlike ToolTips these appear when the system does whatever it does and not on mouseover. Eg. when your harddisk is full an icon appears in the systemtray (i.e. the panel in Gnome-Speak) and the bubble tells you "What happened to my disk space?
Your harddisk only has 100 MB left.
It is recommended that you free up some more disk-space by clicking on this icon."

Or if you open the Start-Menu and the new "Smart-Menu"-feature kicks in (which hides seldom used items) it says
"Where have my programs gone?
Windows now only shows your most recently used programs.
To show the others click the ^ icon."

Unlike Tooltips (which are square-shaped and only contain text) these bubbles look like bubbles (much like MacOS) and have pictures and formatted text in it.

Same goes in other situations. This feature propably first appeared in Microsoft Publisher 2.0 (1992?) where such bubbles would alert you to keyboard-shortcuts, and on how to zoom in on the page. 



 
> >  I.e. if the features is activated for the first time a speech-bubble
> > appears, telling something like
> 
> What is activated, the bubble help or the menu highlight?

The menu highlight, i.e. for the first time something is highlighted (this is more useful for icons - which was also proposed - on the desktop than for menu-items, but works for both). So when you first view a menu which has something printed in bold the bubble would appear.


> > "Why has my icon suddenly turned bold?
> > Gnome automatically detects your favorite items.
> > If you use an item a lot it will turn bold so you can spot it easily."
> 
> Now people will say "Geee, when I place the cursor near most used
> items, it says that they are highlighted due that, do the computer
> believe I am stupid or what?". 

This would only appear once so you'll know it for the future. Unlike Tooltips this is not about mouseover-hints. Also nobody would guess that printing something bold (or colored or whatever) means that this is a feature used very often.

> I say this cos I know how people get
> pissed off sometimes with ideas someone think are cool, but they do
> not (talking clip is one).

But if something is not obvious it should be explained at least once.
 
> And BTW, maybe the user wants help to tell him other things, not that
> one. Also seen a lot "why this stupid doc has all these text, but I
> can not find the solution to my doubt?".

That's a problem with the help-files, but not with the general idea of popup-explanation. As you pointed out, if (some of) your menu-items/desktop icons suddenly change font-face, color or whatever this would be irritating to the user. So an explanation in place would be really useful.

> > About theme support: There should be an option in the theme-definition to
> > define what "frequently used" items should look like (bold face, color,
> > italics, ...).
> 
> Go tell GTK+ theme coders and makers, supposing that idea is good.
> The highlight thing, IMO is a bit distracting in general, and instead
> of providing all solutions, you are telling them to use some again and
> again, instead of maybe trying a new one (that, sometimes, is better
> than the one he used in the past). 

Well, there are only 4 solutions possible in my opinion:
- Extract frequently used commands and put them in a central place
- Hide infrequently used commands from the user
- Highlight frequently used commands in the list
- Reorder commands according to relevance

None is perfect, but only highlighting requires theme-support.

> Seeing that you can use other
> systems (Mac too?), does Mac do that? Or it is really new? Or was
> discarded by Mac coders?

Well, no OS currently does it dynamically according to user-access. Microsoft has the (not so useful) menu-hiding feature (in Office + Windows Startmenu + Internet Explorer Favorites). OS/2 and Windows 95 (and partially the Mac) had Highlighting of items the developers considered important.

The main problem is that it takes a lot of time to find out what the user does and the feature will appear quite suddenly out of nothing.

Michael Beurskens