Re: [Usability] Filechooser: Add/Remove buttons required?

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 15:14 -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> Honestly, adding some simple Add/Remove buttons for this shouldn't be
> that big of a deal.  Given the several useless buttons already present
> in the mockups floating around, I think we've got plenty of room for
> it... ;-)


True, but I'd hope that most of those buttons will vanish. ;)
I'm not really happy with the placement of the Add/Remove buttons on the
current[1] layout. Does it make sense to place them at the top, even
before the "Up" button? And wouldn't they look better, if they'd be
homogeneous?
Maybe it could be as simple as this:
http://liebesgedichte.net/Temp/filesel-spark3-simple.png (with icons of
course)
Another suggestion which is included in this mockup would be to move the
"Up" button (which I named Parent Folder, not sure if that's better) to
the top right corner. This would solve the problem that this button
currently is located above the location list instead of above the file
list and it would also balance the "weight" of the dialog a bit more.
But then again, it might be crap...

I also thought about putting it directly into the file list:
http://liebesgedichte.net/Temp/filesel-spark3.png
but I'm not sure if that would be a good idea and especially if this
wouldn't be too complicated to implement for now.

Of course the right thing to do might be to design the dialogs (open and
save) from scratch, with some proper usability testing and research. So
this is all just minor food for thought how the current one could be
laid out a bit better.

Daniel


[1] http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-photos/gtkfilechooser-
2004-01-05.png