Re: [Usability]Re: Toolbar editor

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley pilot msu edu>]

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