Re: Unwanted behavior with menu item accelerators

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

January Weiner 3 wrote:

> Well, here I don't have any knowledge, because up untill now I never met a
> blind Linux user 

Well, if you hang out on gnome-accessibility-list, you'll meet at least
one  :o)

> (anyway, I can imagine that there are greater problems
> with Linux then shortcuts in gtk programs

That is certainly true, and it's one of the aims of the GNOME
Accessibility Project to go some way to solving those problems, and to
make it easier for other app developers to avoid causing similar
problems in the future.

> Try that with a Mac, my point being is that each system *is* a little
> different. 

A very valid point, and would never suggest we should just copy another
desktop just for the hell of it.  Unfortunately though, when it comes to
GUIs, "a little different" is often more confusing than "a lot
different"...

> What I mean -- sorry for my pidgin english -- is that without additional
> effort you can let the user customize the application freely.

Don't worry, I know what you meant really  :o)  Yes, it's nice when
developers can provide this sort of functionality to users with the
minimum of effort.

> The user should be given the possibility of creating a custom shortcut
> without any effort for any menu option/entry he would like to. If he messes
> up, so what? 

Now, there's a question we could probably argue about the answer to for
the rest of the week :o)  My personal view: a well-designed GUI doesn't
ever let you mess up, unless you really try very hard.  Experiment yes,
mess up, no. (And yes, there's a fine line between the two!)  

If you do mess up, you should be able to get back to a non-messed-up
state with the minimum of effort... can you easily Undo a
mistakenly-changed menu accelerator in a gtk application?  Not really,
as far as I know, unless you happen to remember what the previous
accelerator was.  But if you've changed it by mistake, you're unlikely
to have been paying attention to details like that, whether you're blind
or not  :o)

> He closes my Arka, and Arka asks politely: "I see you have
> modified some shortcut keys. Do you want to save this combination? Click
> *here* for more information about the shortcut keys".

That is certainly one solution to the problem that would work not too
badly. But you could also argue that it's a bit like the animated Start
arrow on the taskbar in M$ Windows-- adding a whole new GUI element to
cover up for the inadequacies of the orginal one  :o)

> but saying that "we cannot do it, because it is not intuitive for the 
> Windows/ MacOS user" is a nice way of creating another Windows or MacOS version, 
> which we already have plenty of. If that is the case, forget multiple desktops, middle 
> mouse click, cut & paste by simple clicking, running X aps on another machines and all
> the other goodies.

I quite agree, just blindly copying stuff from elsewhere isn't the way
to innovate.  Sometimes though, it would be nice if people thought
through the consequences of their cool new features a little further
before we all adopted them  :o)

> Yeah, which means no programmer will ever bother to use it, unless you can
> switch this behaviour on / off somehow independently of what the programmer
> did in the code.

I'm sure Havoc will be able to tell us how it works-- I agree it will
only really work well if can switch the feature on/off dynamically for
all apps on your desktop, from the control center or something.  Or
perhaps on a per-application basis.

> No. I will *not*, I repeat, I will not do any stupid, mean remarks about
> the usability of our SUN workstations here. :-P

That's alright, they were designed by the ergonomists in our hardware
group, I have nothing to do with them  :o)

> On a more serious note: what reading would you recommend for a [wannabe]
> programmer about making the programs userfriendly, apart from the Human
> Interface Guide by Apple?

Well, there are links to some pretty comprehensive reading lists and
good UI design websites on the GNOME Usability Project website: 
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/references.html

Of the websites it points to, the User Interface Hall of Shame is
particularly worth a visit! 

Some of my own favourite books in each of the main areas of UI design
would be:

- "GUI Design for Dummies" (Laura Arlov, IDG) -- yes, seriously!
- "User and Task Analysis for Interface Design" (Hackos+Redish, Wiley)--
heavy stuff!
- "Handbook of Usability Testing" (Jeff Rubin, Wiley)-- very readable
- "Designing Visual Interfaces" (Mullet+Sano, Prentice-Hall)-- very
pretty :o)

You'll also find pointers to online UI Design Guides for nearly all the
major GUI toolkits (Mac, Windows, SGI, Java, Motif etc.) at
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/styleguides.html

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems