[Usability]Re: notification area

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 23:02, Bill Haneman wrote:

> > > 	+ Balloon messages should always have a timeout. Need to
> > > 	  define the timeout length.
> 
> Will these behave "just like tooltips" ?  Can they be keyboard
> posted/unposted?

The balloons are triggered by events, so keyboard posting probably isn't
really an option unless each icon (or the notification area itself)
maintains some sort of event history that you could then review.  It
should certainly be possible to unpost them with the keyboard, though...
on Windoze the equivalent balloons have a Close button.

> Timer-based stuff of this sort tends to make trouble for accessibility,
> BTW.  As a rule it's not supposed to be done, or one should be able to
> turn it off.  Trouble is, this often means that it needs to be redundant
> with some other kind of notification, making the whole business of
> timer-based stuff less attractive.

On Windows, I think the time-out depends on the severity of the
message.  Critical messages like "you're running out of disk space"
don't seem to disappear until you dismiss them, but the "Now Connected"
balloon you get when your dial-up connection is established only hangs
around for a few seconds.  (But even after the latter is gone, you can
still see that the connection was successful because you the network
activity icon remains there, so maybe that's a better criterion for
deciding).

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