Re: [Usability] My second file chooser proposal

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Mon, 2003-09-15 at 22:42, Magnus Bergman wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Sep 2003 20:23:18 +0100 (BST)
> Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie> wrote:

> > As far as I knew scan order is entirely cultural and based on reading.
> >
> > Europeans and North Americans and more, read from left to right, top
> > to bottom.
> 
> Are you sure it's entirely based on reading? I've came across theories
> about the fact that most people are right handed has something to do
> with it. This might affect we consider right to be forward and left

Right.  So let's royally screw over the left-handed people, like half my
family, in all parts of the world, because interface ergonomics are
based on handedness and the left-handers don't matter.  Just like we
don't care about the other "handicapped" users in GNOME, right? 
*that'll* go over well.  If it is handedness that matters most, the
solution isn't "most people are right handed", it's, "how do we make the
GUI change order based not on language, but handedness selections?".

> being backwards. Another thing that might have had an impact on the
> western culture is Christianity which had a concept of right being good
> and left being evil. That was taken quite seriously some hundred years
> ago and might have had an impact cultures with a right to left locale as

Do you have a source of this?  It truly sounds like something pulled
from a behind...

> well. Many years of western influences (like video players and comic
> books) and globalisation in general has for sure influenced other

Comic books?  All the graphic novels *I* read are right-to-left.  Comic
books w/ right-to-left orders are only in cultures where the language
goes right-to-left.  Comic books aren't the influence, they're another
sympton of the reading order of the language.

As any scientist will tell you, *nothing* about correlation implies
causation.  You need proof and research, not random guessing or
convenient fact inventing.

> cultures too. And perhaps those things has affected their scan order
> too. (If anybody know about some scientific research at least related to
> this, don't hesitate to tell me.) What I really want to say is that it's
> PERHAPS not safe to assume that it is appropriate to "mirror" the gui if
> the direction of the text is right to left.

Unfortunately, it is quite hard to work going in one direction when the
text moves in the other.  If you don't believe me, try it.  Layout a
dialog to work right-to-left and keep using English.  It gets a bit
awkward, doesn't it?

If you're going to force users to use an order that isn't the same as
their language, you'll probably need to force the culture to swap their
language around as well.  ;-)

> 
> > I was quite surprised to see that the Asian version of Microsoft
> > Windows I saw had everthing left to right, but directional text
> > support is difficult and Western influence is strong.
> 
> You don't have some pointers to this? It would be very interesting to
> look at. It would help to know what their Windows verison look like if I
> find some Asian people to discuss this subject with.

One thing to remember is that the Win32 API does *not* make reordering
of dialogs easy at all.  Where GTK can reorder certain things on the
fly, Win32 forces manual layout of everything.  I can't say for sure,
but I'd imagine that hinders reflow of dialogs a *lot*.

> 
> > > I'm not personally aware of any languages that flow bottom to top,
> > > but there are plenty that go right to left.  If a dialog only works
> > > well in left-to-right scenarios, it could be less than ideal.
> > 
> > Japanese goes in columns from top to bottom, right to left.
> 
> Both text in columns and rows exist. I think rows are slowly taking
> over. I have read in several places that humans are faster at scanning
> rows than columns (and AFAIK that doesn't differ between cultures). This
> is mentioned in most interface design guidelines, i think.

Has to do with eye movements and such, I believe, yes.  I know I've seen
study/research on this before, and believe you're correct.

> 
> It might be interesting to Microsoft interface design guidelines also
> says that menus should only contain a few items (since they are
> relatively difficult to scan). Further it recommends that two level
> menus should be avoided and that more than two levels must never be
> used. After coming up to this (which they probably spent a lot of
> resources on) they design the start button as a central part of their
> GUI!

On one hand, they've got some good points about menu usage.  On the
other hand, I haven't seen a graphical UI that *doesn't* have large,
deep menues in a couple places at least.  I don't think we can rip on
Microsoft for doing what we and everyone else do.  ;-)  (We have enough
*other* reasons to rip on them, anyways ^,^ )

> 
> > I would not be surprised if Asian designers wanted to come up with
> > designs that better suited their culture.  At this stage there must be
> > quite a few cultural oddities in Gnome we dont even realise.
> 
> Yes, I know there are. What different colors, in the stock icons,
> represents for example (in Japan they have blue traffic lights). At same
> point I think the stock icons most be "translated" to be more adequate
> in different cultures. There are probably also cases there some symbols

This I highly agree with.  No matter how much the HIG influences
culture-agnostic icon design, there are still very many icons that
simply aren't culture agnostic.  I.e., font selector icon - how do you
make that language agnostic?  You should me a couple kanji in different
styles in an icon, I'm going to start thinking about an art application
or comic/manga viewer.  I'm sure the styled A's we have now cause
similar confusion in other cultures.  And there are many, many more such
examples.

> makes as much sense to us that it does to them, but they have symbols
> that are even better for them (but makes little sense to us). The kanji
> character set (used in China and Japan) is basically a set of symbols
> and might be very good to base icons on. Maybe I will try to contact
> some of the gnome projects Japanese translators about opinions about
> this matter.
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.