Re: [Usability] Find bar variants

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Great message.

On Wed, 2005-02-16 at 16:53 +0100, Christian Persch wrote:
>- Evince:
>  * Close button at the start

I think we're going in favor of the auto-hide like Epiphany

>  * Prev, Next buttons

We tried up/down buttons and they were just a little too confusing for
some reason.  It could be that we auto-wrap the search so you're not
always going up or down, but to the next result.

>  * Case sensitivity checkbox

I've been tempted to clear this since I have a hunch it gets zero usage.
However for now it doesn't hurt to keep.

>  * Status text

I'm not sure if we're going to keep this, there's some things I like
about it and some I don't.  We wanted feedback on whether results were
found or not and this seems to do pretty well.  Since we're not really
tight on space and it doesn't internationalize very well we didn't do
the red entry box that firefox does when no results are found.

>  * Spans whole width of window

This was just about using all the space we have.  I don't think that the
find bar needs to be confined just to the document window.
>
>So:
>- Should they have a Close button ?

I think we're going to try not having one soon.  So I'd say no assuming
we get some feedback that is pretty positive about this.

>- Should they span the whole width of the window, or exclude sidebar
>areas?

I don't think this is a big deal really, I would take up whatever space
you have since the find bar is at the bottom and only about 24 pixels
tall it can't cover up too much important stuff in sidebars.

>- Next, Prev of Prev, Next button order?

We played with ours for a while and found the [< Previous] [> Next]
seemed most rational.  I'd recommend going with that, someone tried to
point out a Fitt's law argument here where the Next is the most used and
should be closer to the text entry.  I don't think the Fitt's law
argument is valid.  The order choice was because having the buttons
point at each other looked weird. :-)

>- Is case sensitivity common enough to warrant a checkbox in the find
>bar?

Like I said, probably not, but we weren't tight on space.

>- Should Enter activate Next, or some other action (for example,
>activate the link if the text searched for occurs in a web page link)?

We use Enter for next.  I also want to try using the status text area
for describing this initially.  So when you hit Ctrl-F and haven't
started searching it says something like "[Enter] For Next Result,
[SHIFT][Enter] for Previous".  I'll see how it works, but it's just
something I'd like to experiment with since there's no way to convey
accelerators on buttons.

Epiphany might try something with the status text (if you had status
text) where it can say: "Press Ctrl-Enter to activate link" in the link
situation.  Just a thought.

-----

My questions for others is: Are you supporting '/' as an alternative
Ctrl-F keybinding to bring up the find bar?  I'm thinking about saying
yes for Evince.  Just to keep those *nix weirdos happy ;-)

Cheers,
~ Bryan