Re: [Usability]Re: Toolbar editor



Arnaud Charlet wrote:

Yes it is, but the whole point of a toolbar is only to contain the "more
often used actions".  Infrequently-used items have no business being on
the toolbar to start with, the question really  is whether we should
allow users to add them later if they want to :)

As already said before, for any reasonably sized application, you can't
guess in advance which features will be used more often, in particular
if your user base is large, so I don't see how the position you're taking
can scale, even with a smiley :-)

This is not true, you can do user testing and see what items the majority of users use most often. For a word processsor, you could ask a group to write a document on a certain subject and include certain rules about how the document should be formatted etc, and see what tools they use.

Yes, for simple applications you can take the viewpoint that
'the programmer could/should get things right, and the user should not
have the need to choose'. This approach simply does not scale for big
application providing lots of features, users do need and ask for being
able to customize these things (toolbar, menus, ...).

My comment btw is based on experience in writing and supporting such large
software, it's not a theoretical rethoric.

Arno
Well I'll give my real world experience example:


I recently took a clerical test with kelly services which tested my skills on ms word and excel. I am by no means a power user of these apps, but i've been using both since around 1994 or so I would guess. During my test i was asked to find certain toolbar items (keep in mind that the default toolbar layout in both apps was icons only.) For most toolbar items that I was asked to find and click, the icons associated with the item were not clear and nearly none of them immediately shouted at me "i am this tool." Hence, for each item i was asked to find i had to go through all the toolitems one by one, waiting for a tooltip to popup in order to find the requested item.

Moral of the story it is much easier to look for a label than an icon (notable case is when a symbol is so embeded in society that nearly anyone will recongnize it). Another observation is that even long time users of office apps use probably 10% of the features, but the perceive need of these feature is used to bloat the interface as to make it extremely hard to use, for the 90% of people that only use 10% of the features.

Whats the solution? Well in the case of toolbars we have a really good one. Reduce the default set to the 10% of features that most users will use most often, and supply toolbar editting for users who want/need the other 90% of features.

dave




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