Re: [Usability] Sound Juicer 2 mockup comments

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 18:17, Bryan Clark wrote:

> I don't want this to start into a Stop/Pause/Play discussion like what
> was had on the list before, but accessibility gets messed up by having
> the buttons change on click (from play to pause) the way to get around
> this issue is to have your play button be a toggle button.   People
> understand when the play button toggles down that the way to stop/pause
> play will be to untoggle the button and the button never changes it's
> value.  I've planned on putting this into HIG recommendations, but I
> need to catch up with calum for a little discussion before writing it
> in.  I'd recommend this for Totem as well Bastien ;-)

Certainly sounds better than toggling labels, but without trying it I'm
not sure how natural it would feel in practise-- by making Play 'stick'
when you push it in, the metaphor suddenly becomes more like that of a
tape player (remember those?), and they always have a separate Pause
button that also sticks, and a separate Stop button that doesn't :) 
Perhaps if it was a double-width button with both Play and Pause (or
Play and Stop) symbols on it, the meaning would be more apparent,
although I seem to remember we chided the CD applet a few years ago for
doing such a thing...

(Also you wouldn't normally want to sneak a toggle button into the
middle of a row of regular buttons if you could avoid it, since they
look the same but behave differently, but I guess we're running low on
options here.)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
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