Re: [Usability]Eugenia's UI review/mockup

[Markus Berg <kelvin lysator liu se>]

On Wed, 2002-08-07 at 07:38, Daniel Borgmann wrote:
> Eugenia wrote a constructive article nitpicking on some UI issues on
> RedHat/GNOME/Gtk:
> http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=1495
> 
> While I don't agree with some of this points (smaller text? uargh) and
> some of this are specific problems of this RedHat tool, some points
> probably should be discussed/improved.

Note: this "UI review" is primarily based on a partial screen shot of a
Red Hat beta release.

> 2.) "Go to theme folder" was suggested to be "Open theme folder". What
> do you think? It seems to make sense as this button indeed opens a new
> view/folder and not directly goes to it. Also it's shorter (in
> wordcount).

I agree on this.

> 3.) She suggests different (in brightness) colors for elements like
> buttons or childviews (groups, etc). I don't know if this is technically
> possible in a theme but basically I like this suggestion (it has
> certainly usability advantages and also looks quite nice). 

This might be a good suggestion, but it's hard to say based on just the
one screen shot. I'd want to see this in action before making a
judgment. It does add additional depth to the desktop.

> 4.) Bold font for group headers? I really like this suggestion, what do
> you think? This would make groups probably much more noticable (and
> easier to group the elements in your mind as there is more visual
> separation). 
> 
> 5.) I might also add that she believes in different font sizes for
> certain elements, like fontsize+1 for buttons but I'm _strongly_ against
> this as there is a reason why I choose a certain fontsize and I don't
> want it to be changed for anything... I'm not so sure if this is just
> me.

I find both of these suggestions Crack(tm) as they introduce more font
variations in _all_ windows. In the reviewer's mock-up screenshot
http://goober.osnews.com/img/1495/modified.png
there are at least _four_ different font weights/sizes in every window
(including very small windows).

> Well, that's it. I don't find the other points to be particulary
> usefull, but that's just my humble opinion.

Agreed. The only other suggestion that I found interesting (again, hard
to say with just the one screen shot) was the "one pixel" rounded
corners on all widgets.

> BTW, is visual design still part of usability (even if it's only about
> looking good)? If not, what do you think about a mailinglist about this
> topic? I'm not talking about the art-stuff like icons or themes but the
> visual quality of button layouts, applications, panels, etc. I'm very
> interested in this kind of stuff but don't want to flood the usability
> mailinglist with those discussions if it's offtopic.

I doubt that the traffic would be high enough to justify a separate
mailing list. You could just start using the gnome-themes-list for this
as that mailing list has very low traffic.
---
Markus Berg