[Usability]Re: GNOME-SEARCH-TOOL

[Michael Toomim <toomim uclink4 berkeley edu>]

Calum Benson wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-08-15 at 10:57, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
>>On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Chris Chabot wrote:
>>
>>>Ps, when you call it additional constraints, it looks a little bit weird
>>>that there is a 'delete' button .. it feels more proper to 'remove a
>>>constraint' then to 'delete a constaint'. But that might just be my
>>>europian perspective on things ;-)
>>
>>Furthermore a Delete button might give the impression that found files
>>will be deleted.
>
>
> I agree, 'delete' doesn't look quite right here.  Maybe it's more
> obvious what it means when you have multiple constraints (and therefore
> multiple delete buttons), but it's a bit ambiguous when there's only
> one.

I think the garbage can icon might be largely to blame.

> "Add search constraint": I assume the plan here is that a constraint
> will be added as soon as you select from the option menu?  This violates
> a HIG guideline: "do not initiate an action when the user selects an
> item on an option menu".  There should probably be an explicit "Add"
> button you have to press.

Hmm.. yeah you're right.  The idea wasn't that a new constraint would be 
added when you chose an option, but that the option *was* a new 
constraint.  Instead of requiring you to push "add" all the time, the 
idea was to make there always be one extra blank constraint waiting for 
use at all times, and you'd just have to change the type from "select a 
constraint" to "contains text" or whatever to use it (at which time 
another blank constraint would appear).  But yeah, this is pretty weird.

How about adopting a more mozilla-like approach? (see screenshot)  The 
search tool can probably be simplified (no action, only a single 
drop-menu, no filter name, only allow "match all of the following"...), 
but the general constraing management design works pretty well I think.