Re: [Usability]Extremely narrow toolbar icons

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

Nice to read that! :) I filed the bug:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91344

- Daniel


On Wed, 2002-08-21 at 19:31, bordoley msu edu wrote:
> Short but sweet answer.
> 
> This is a bug in bonobo. There has been a little discussion on the correct way
> for this to be done, and i believe the current consensus is that there should
> be a minimum width for buttons so that you do not have the problem you
> described below, while buttons with longer labels are allowed to be wider. I
> think a bonobo ui bug may already be open, but if not file one please.
> 
> dave
> 
> Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net> said:
> 
> > Hello again,
> > 
> > sorry for spamming this list, but this just caught my attention and 
> > I believe it's too important to let it slip.
> > I read this nice article about distance and size of targets in a GUI,
> > etc, I guess you all know it. At the end it made a little fun of users
> > who like to pretend they can work faster with small icons and I felt a
> > little bit embarrassed. ;) So I tried the "Text below icons" toolbar
> > mode instead of prioritytext like I did before. First I tested this in
> > Galeon and found out that it really makes me a bit faster in hitting the
> > NEW and RELOAD buttons which I used quite a lot and the BACK button was
> > still large enough (or a big larger), I just need to get used to it's
> > new position. 
> > But then I tried Nautilus and found that my BACK and UP buttons are both
> > extremely narrow. They use only as much width as the text needs. This
> > results in those (the most important!) buttons beeing the smallest,
> > while FORWARD and RELOAD (I barely ever use them) are the largest. The
> > BACK button now is even more difficult to hit than with priority text
> > and it feels unimportant next to the large FORWARD button.
> > This is all opposed to Galeon where every button is of the same width
> > and conventionally large. So I'm wondering, why was it decided to narrow
> > them down as much as possible? And isn't this really terrible for a GUI?
> > I'm cowering in fear that Galeon2 will show the same behaviour. Please
> > tell me that this was just an oversight and not an intentional design
> > decision. It also breaks the HIG rule that buttons in a row should have
> > the same width btw, if you see them as buttons. Oh I will hurry to quit
> > now as there is a terrible storm right above our house, eek!
> > 
> > - Daniel *runs*