RE: Column View

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 19:29, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:

> I'd love to hear about some user studies. If Apple did them then I hope
> there is some information about them out there. Personally, I don't believe
> that Apple do user studies anymore, or they don't do them like they used to.

About ten years back when I was working on a styleguide for Reuters, we
did a study of trees v. column views for navigating hierarchical
geographic information (continent->country->city, more or less).

Our target audience (stock traders and fund managers) found the browsers
easier to use, but we only tested hierarchies that were three or four
levels deep (hence no horizontal scrolling), since that's all they ever
had to deal with.  Unfortunately I've long since lost contact with any
report we wrote about it though. It's probably also true that tree
controls were fairly novel in those days compared to flat lists, regular
computer users will likely have had much more exposure to trees
nowadays, although they're not inherently any easier to use than they
were in those days.

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems