Re: [Usability]Re: An alternative proposal for instant-apply vs. non-instant-apply

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 10Sep2001 01:24PM (-0700), Kenny Graunke wrote:
> <quote who="Michael Rogers">
> 
> > Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> > > I've been thinking about this tonight and I came up with "audiovisual
> > > feedback". Already GTK widgets can "light up" when the mouse pointer is
> > > over them. My idea is to distinguish instant-apply from delayed-apply by
> > > highlighting the entire widget that was activated, and let the selection
> > > gradually fade away.
> > 
> > Another idea based on the same principle but kind of reversed:
> > 
> > In all dialogs, changes that have not yet been applied should be
> > highlighted. (The widget should remain in the 'changed'/'dirty' state
> > until the changes are applied.) This would make the distinction between
> > instant-apply and explicit-apply dialogs obvious, and would provide
> > visual feedback for Apply and Reset/Revert. It would also make it
> > possible to use instant-apply dialogs for changes that might take a
> > couple of seconds to apply: the changes would be highlighted until they
> > had been applied. In a notebook widget, the tabs of 'dirty' pages should
> > be highlighted so that the user can easily see which pages will be
> > affected when the Apply or OK button is pressed.
> 
> I like the sound of this - it's definately something worth looking into. If
> done correctly, this could help considerably.
> 

I'm thinking all these ideas are overkill given that we don't know of
an actual user problem they'd be solving. If formal user testing shows
there is confusion in this area we could consider changes like this,
if not, they just seem gratuitously distracting.

 - Maciej