[Usability]Re: Notification Area guidelines

[Evan Martin <martine cs washington edu>]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 01:59:20PM +1300, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > > 	I think the gnomeicu approach is much, much more sane. If you think
> > > about it from the "software should act like a butler" analogy, the gaim
> > > approach is like telling your butler you have no need of his services to
> > > which he responds by running behind the sofa and staying there until you
> > > roar "will you ever F**K off and leave me alone!".
> > > 
> > > 	We don't need "minimise", "close" and "really close" buttons imho.
> > 
> > WRT user expectation, my Windows-using (non-geek) friend came over the
> > other day and hit the close button on my GAIM window.  He expected it to
> > minimize, but since I wasn't using the GNOME version, it closed GAIM,
> > and he got confused and a bit frustrated.
>
> 	And therein lies the problem. Such behaviour confuses the meaning of
> the "close" button. I don't think we want such confusion in GNOME thank
> you very much :-)

Well, there is a rationalization, sorta: you really are closing the window,
in that it's not visible anymore and it's not in the standard list of
minimized windows.  The difference here is that you intend to get rid of
the window and not the application.

So I could imagine someone becoming equally confused by your proposed
behavior: they'll click the minimize button and the window will suddenly
disappear from the window list (which any casual user likely thinks of
as a task list).

I'm not suggesting that close-hides behavior is better; I'm just pointing
out that it's not as cut-and-dry as you might think.

--evan, who once was hired to develop an app with this behavior for
Windows and who decided there was No Good Answer to the question long
ago. :)

-- 
      Evan Martin
martine cs washington edu
  http://neugierig.org