Re: [Usability] Better look Re: (no subject)

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

--- Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com> wrote:
> Both Human and Clearlooks, though, like Luna,
> Platinum, and Windows 3.x  
> before them, are very cartoonish. They look like pen
> drawings of  
> controls, rather than actual controls.

But what should actual controls look like?
Platinum and Windows 3.x went for the 3D look grey,
like something that sticks out of the screen. OS X's
Aqua had the water-droplet look, and has recently
modified it to look sunken into rather than sitting on
the screen.

Computer screens are not like anything else. Should
they try to emulate real-life buttons and objects?
(And these are sometimes not emulating modern computer
interfaces.)

The purpose of buttons and other UI widgets is to be
clearly visible as parts of the screen that can be
clicked or interacted with.

But I've worked with users who aren't familiar with
computer interfaces at all, and whether it's Windows
or OS X, they just don't perceive UI widgets as
something clickable. It's just screen clutter to them.

Given that, I don't think GUI elements should try to
be anything other than themselves.

> Sadly, from looking briefly through the gtk2 themes
> on art.gnome.org,  
> they all either have that pixelly cartoon
> appearance, or they have a  
> light-on-dark color scheme (great for an alternative
> theme, poor for a  
> default), or they have sunken checkboxes and
> radiobuttons (which looks  
> wrong when embedded in listboxes, which is why
> Windows 98 and 2000  
> often used an inconsistent flat style for checkboxes
> and radiobuttons  
> inside listboxes), or they're ripoffs of Aqua.

I've found one or two I like, but as another poster in
this thread said, they're often inconsistent, or have
some elements that let the rest down (scroll bars and
panel dividers usually).



		
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