Re: [HIG] Policy questions

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Matthew Thomas wrote:

> That would mean that Escape would have a different effect depending on
> whether you pressed it 1.999 seconds or 2.000 seconds after focusing a
> particular control (i.e. just before/after the help tip appeared).

I think the current plan is that Esc would only dismiss tooltips that
had been explicitly popped up from the keyboard in the first place
(using Ctrl+F1).  There's been some debate about whether the user should
have to do this on a control-by-control basis or have a "keyboard
tooltip browsing mode" that you get into with Ctrl+F1 and get out of by
pressing Esc (a bit like balloon help, I suppose), to name but two
alternatives.  But either way, Esc wouldn't dismiss tooltips that had
been popped up by hovering the mouse pointer over a control.

> I predict that either of these would frustrate users considerably. In
> addition, the more usable a theme was (i.e. the more contrast it made
> between the default button and non-default buttons), the more unstable
> it would look as focus was moved between controls.

So what do you suggest?

> Right. This is one of the most annoying features of Windows, leading to
> an infamous Mozilla bug
> <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49844>.

Can't say it's a problem I've ever had myself when using Windows, but
anyways... the underlying problem here is that people can't reliably
predict what's going to happen when they drag something from one place
to another, so they do it with the right button to make sure they can
pick the right action at the end.  This is certainly the only reason I
use it, and in particular when dragging files/aliases around, because
(in Windows at least), you get different behaviour depending on whether
you're dragging a folder, an executable, a document or a link, and then
again depending on whether you're dragging within a volume or from one
volume to another.  This behaviour may or may not be "logical" or
"safe", but half the time it's never what I want and I can never
remember what's actually going to happen anyway.

So, the real solution is really to make drag behaviours completely
consistent and predictable, but any time we have that discussion we
re-discover that it's kind of hard :)

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