Re: [Usability]toolbar icons/text

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Thu, 2002-08-08 at 20:35, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On 06Aug2002 02:56PM (-0700), snickell stanford edu wrote:
> > 
> > There are essentially two camps where toolbars are concerned: the "make
> > it so most users would never have to touch a menu if they didn't want
> > to" camp exemplified by Microsoft Office and the "make toolbars a
> > shortcut for the several most common items" camp exemplified by many Mac
> > OS/X applications. Since I have a feeling most GNOME people wouldn't be
> > thrilled with the latter (I would, but its hard to convince people to
> > only have 5 or 6 toolbar items), priority text provides a nifty
> > compromise. Show the other items but provide a mechanism (the text) for
> > highlighting the most important items.
> 
> I think a better solution is to start with relatively few toolbar
> items (8-9 is OK) and have a customize toolbar option. That way you
> start with only the most common shortcuts that all users care about,
> and everyone can add their favorites.

With 8-9 toolbar items I think it becomes desirable to have some
differentiation between "important toolbar items" and "not as important
toolbar items". This is partly achievable by trying to put the most
important items further to the left, but I don't know how effective that
technique will be in many cases (particularly where it may pull items
out of a logical grouping).

I definitely prefer the MacOS/X approach of using a very small number of
toolbar items, but as I stated before I'm not sure its feasible to gain
support for that at this time. Will Gnumeric, AbiWord, etc be willing to
strip down to a really small number of toolbar entries? Its almost a
tradition in office applications (a terrible one, but tradition is hard
for many people to break) to have giant toolbars. If this is not going
to happen, I think prioritized text is better than a large number of
titled icons. You could say I'm trying to cut my losses by pushing for
prioritized text.

> > The disadvantage of priority text relative to text+icons is obviously
> > that you don't have immediate text access to all toolbar items. But
> > since text is probably most relevant to new users of applications, who
> > are probably going to be most interested in priority-text icons (that
> > is, if they are chosen well), this may not be such a loss.
> 
> If the items useful to new users are scattered among unlabelled items
> that are not useful to new users, then it will be much harder for new
> users to find what they want, defeating the purpose of the toolbar as
> a place for important shortcuts.

I think it would be better than a large number of labled items because
it helps differentiate the most important items. Also, these items will
probably not be sprinkled throughout the toolbar but will usually be put
on the left.

> Incidentally, there are many apps on OS X where I almost never have to
> open the menus, even though they have relatively few toolbar items.

Yeah, I think this is fantastic, and I'd love to do this if I can get
support for it. Its going to take maintainers willing to go at their
toolbars with an axe (or let me do it ;-) though.

In summary:

  1) Applications currently use a lot of toolbar items. If this trend is
not broken I think prioritized text is better.
  2) If maintainers are willing to change, I agree with Maciej that text
under icons is better.

-Seth