Re: [Usability] Request for interface mockup

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 22:16, Raphael Bosshard wrote:

> The current implementation is neither very user friendly nor very
> useful. I'd like to make it accessible through the properties dialog.
> This way it would also be possible, to scale several icons to the exacly
> same size.
> 
> However; I'm no UI specialist. 
> Do you have any UI ideas or proposals, how to re-implement the "stretch
> icon" functionality?

Rather than filling up the Properties dialog even further, a more elegant approach might be to enhance the existing direct manipulation method to make it usable from the keyboard, in much the same way that you can resize a window from the keyboard.  This would fill in an accessibility hole[1], it could (in theory) work just as well for multiple selections as for single selections[2], and being a direct manipulation approach, it would potentially be quicker and easier to use than opening a Properties dialog and guessing the right numbers to type in.

If you wanted to do it the Properties way anyway, the "Image Size" dialogs in something like GIMP or Photoshop might give you some ideas.  You'd probably want four text fields (two for showing/changing pixel size, and two for showing/changing X/Y proportion, perhaps in a choice of different units), and a checkbox that allowed the original proportions to be retained whenever you altered the width or height.  As I said, looking at the current Properties dialog, I think you'd probably want to hide such a feature by default, perhaps in a sub-dialog of (or a disclosure widget on) the Basic tab.

Cheeri,
Calum.

[1] So would your Properties solution, of course.
[2] So could the existing direct manipulation method, for that matter.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems