Re: [Usability] RFC: removing some colors from the panel...

[Toady <toady gscore org>]

Le dimanche 05 juin 2005 à 10:47 -0400, Rodney Dawes a écrit :
> I think it's a bad idea. It won't really improve usability. And what do
> you do for, say, the cpu/mem/net usage applet? Black on black isn't
> usable. Grey on black wouldn't be any more usable either. And, then,
> when something important happens, you will have an odd mix of grayscale
> and color. Of course, the panel could just keep everything grayscale,
> too. But that kind of defeats the purpose of notifications.

Fixing this is not a big matter if it improves the usability. Any applet
will comply to this standard then.

> 
> Of course, the fact that everything in the "panel" in Mac OS X is
> grayscale works for them. And it works for them, because they have
> total control over it. There are no themes. They aren't notifications.
> They are meant to give you quick access to some application, and they
> all behave like menus. Because they all are menus, and they are in the
> menu bar.

Right. However, even with themes this is not a big matter. Applying a
filter on top of each applet is fair enough to let themes out of it.
As for notification thing, if the applet gets colorized, that would help
the user to see that something is happening. Maybe without even to use
blinking stuff.

> 
> Simply fading everything to grayscale in GTK+ will also probably confuse
> the user into thinking that the items are inaccessible. What about the
> desktop? There are many more colors on my desktop, than there are on the
> panel, with all the documents, launchers, and thumbnails.

It is not just grayscale, it is black and white. This is different.
Look at this:
http://www.gscore.org/blog/index.php?2005/06/04/203-improving-gtk-ui

You can see in the second picture the stuff which are black and white.
And it doesn't seem to be inaccessible items. It just helps user to
focus on what he wants to archieve.

> 
> If your eye is constantly going to the panel, then it seems to me like
> there may be problems with individual things in the panel. Or perhaps
> your eye is just trained by muscle reflex to look at the panel every now
> and then to see if anything interesting is happening. Maybe it's to
> check on the weather, or the time, or instant messages. Maybe there are
> items in your panel which are too heavily animated, that cause you to
> look there. I don't know. Maybe you've shoved the panel full of
> launchers with largely varying colors in the icons, and that distracts
> you.

Or maybe because you have applets which are useful for you since you've
put them on the panel, and because you don't want to be distracted by
them, you can turn them black and white. 
Color gets the attention, this is a common sense. 

> 
> "Apple does it" is good for thought, but shouldn't be the entire
> heuristic used in the design process. They do just as many things
> for historic or technical reasons, as they do for usability ones. My
> suggestion would be to first figure out why your eye keeps going to
> the panel. I don't believe "color" is the reason. If it were, your
> eye might spend more time on the desktop, than on the panel. Would
> be nice to figure out what the exact problem is, and examine other
> users as well. There are a lot more people using the machine, than
> the few people who were in Stuttgart that came up with the idea of
> moving everything to grayscale.

We can inovate our way without following Apple. However, their ideas are
often smart. Smart enough to think that they've done right. And
concerning this, I believe they did. (Yeah, they don't have
notification, all menus are in the panel...)

> 
> Please don't use a giant laser on the moon, to kill a mosquito.

Too much Star Wars hey ? :)


Because I stongly believe this is a good idea, and because Jabba the
hutt is Jabba the hutt, this idea can start a flamewar. 

However, to make everyone happy, how about having this as an option
(this obscur key in gconf Vincent mentioned) ? Then users/distributions
can have the right to choose, and lets see what will happen. How about
that ?


Bye,

---
Dark Toady.