Re: [Usability] Selection problems in List view

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel borgmann gmail com>]

On 5/12/05, Diego Moya (a.k.a. TuringTest) <turingt gmail com> wrote:
> > I'm a bit confused, do you suggest that a doubleclick just doesn't
> > activate anything, so you'd have to use the context menu?
> 
> Yes, but that goes mainly as rants to myself. I don't expect every
> gnome app to begin working that way any soon! :-)
> 
> In my perfect interface, commands would be invoked through pie menus
> or gestures, both accessible with the right button. I have configured
> Firefox to work that way. A single click with the right button,
> without dragging, would activate the default action (easier than a
> double click).

Ah yes, I agree that this would be an interesting path to follow. In
fact, I once implemented an interface like this for a (never released)
game. A downside is, that the user is required to hold down the right
mouse button to select other actions, but I think that's justified
(and the accessibility problems could certainly be overcome).
However, are there any piemenu-like designs which would work well for
our cause? It would have to scale to a reasonable number of actions
and ideally it should not be patented...
Of course we could do half of this without the piemenus already, by
just selecting the first item by default and activating it if the
button is released right away. But I'm afraid that the ergonomic
disadvantages of this would be too severe for primitive list menus. It
would also break if a menu can't appear at the cursor position due to
space constraints.

> > This is not exactly true, everything that resembles a button is
> > activated on single click. I understand left click as "touching" an
> > item and ideally it should be obvious from the appearance of the item,
> > whether touching it will trigger some action or not. But even if it's
> > not obvious (like links in web browsers), I'm not sure if this is
> > really a problem, as long as the action is not harmful. Despite the
> > occasional annoyance, users seem to manage pretty well so far. :)
> 
> Hmmmm... you're right. But then, you can't select buttons, so there
> still is no select/activate ambiguity there.
> 
> In links, you have the problem of trying to select a word inside it
> (it's impossible), for example if you want to parse it into a
> spellchecker or a dictionary.

Indeed, this has annoyed me more than once... It is a somewhat
questionable exception (or let's say a corner case).