Re: [Usability]modal vs insensitive dialogs

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 05:30, Jacob Perkins wrote:
> Seahorse has lots of dialogs for doing various operations. These
> operations can only be performed one at a time. Currently, to ensure
> that the user cannot try to do multiple concurrent operations, any open
> dialogs are made insensitive during operation progress. However, it
> seems unlikely that users would really have many operation dialogs open
> anyway, and insensitive dialogs can be ugly. Modal dialogs would at
> least have the benefit of being able to show the user what can and
> cannot be done concurrently.
> So, would having modal dialogs instead of insensitive dialogs be a
> better solution in terms of usability and the HIG?

Hmm, I've never seen seahorse in action, but it does sound like there
might be a fundamentally unpleasant navigation model going on behind the
scenes here.  Modal dialogs are probably more appropriate than disabling
entire dialog boxes at a time, but sometimes they're a sign of papering
over the cracks a little too :)

Another solution might be a single modeless dialog (preferably instant
apply) whose contents changed depending on the current selection in the
main window-- what the HIG  calls a property window.  But without trying
seahorse I don't really know if that's appropriate in your case or
not... I'll try and give it a spin when I've got a minute.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems