Re: [Usability] Double-click in notification area?



On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 16:54 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> It is not an admission, and so far we only know that single click is
> differnt we dont know for sure if it is better.
> That Micrsoft failed to make it work suggest we should be very careful,
> and I would very much like to see problems thoroughly worked out before
> the default gets changed.

Sure, but as people have pointed out: spatial nautilus.

The fact that Microsoft failed to make it work doesn't mean that it's
necessarily a good idea, but their failure certainly doesn't indicate
that the idea is doomed either.

> examples?
> 
> files are opened using double click.
> 
> buttons are activated using single click,
> this is not inconsistant but different by design.

If I have a launcher on the panel (or in a menu), it's activated with
single-click. If I drag this launcher to the desktop, it's activated
with double-click.
If I'm using a web-browser, clicking a link to a file downloads and
opens the file; if I then go to my downloads folder, I need to double-
click to open the file.

You can't argue that this is some kind of object/document-based
distinction - it's purely about which application you are using, and how
the application author thought about using the application.

One general rule is that if you're interacting with your user-local
filesystem, you use double-click to activate. That rule breaks quite
often, and it's very implementation-defined.

A slightly more accurate rule would be that if you're interacting with a
widget in a context in which a selection operation on the widget makes
sense, then single-click is select and double-click is activate. That's
a lot of mental processing to figure out what you need to do.

Is a better explanation of the mental model for figuring out whether
double or single-click activates?

> implementation details need to be sorted out for single click mode
> even if it doesn't get made the default.

Isn't that what we're talking about?

Did you have a specific implementation detail in mind?

-- 
Kai Willadsen <kaiw itee uq edu au>




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