Re: [Usability] A (rather long) list of GNOME usability issues

[Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

2005/10/18, Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert novell com>:
> On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 14:37 +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote:
>
> > With metacity, using ALT while clicking works, but is of course a
> > little inconvenient.
>
> Yeah. Though Alt conflicts with Gimp's and Inkscape's modifier use,
> which sucks.

Fortunately only in the minds of users, since metacity is the one that
catches it first (and blocks it from the app AFAICT).

It's not good still though.

> > In my opinion, unconditional passthru would need
> > visual hinting (more than the titlebar) that tells the user "no, you
> > can't click this button that is in your plain view yet, you have to
> > focus the window first", otherwise there would be lots of furstration
> > about buttons that do not work.
>
> I agree. Wouldnt it be possible to for example hack Clearlooks to
> support this? We'd need to think about the visual style carefully
> though, and the whole behaviour needs to be pondered throughly.

Well, it should only concern the elements you actually expected to do
something, otherwise we would end up possibly destroying key elements
from an UI element (like distorting colors from a colour-dependant
data etc). Figuring out where it would be useful  and where a pain is
not trivial.

In a basic scenario, with some data view and few buttons, the buttons
should be hinting and the data view not. But for a more complex UI it
will become more shady to determine. So it would probably be a choice
of the widget creator to set a widget flag for example. If clearlooks
has a decent way to know if the window is inactive, it could apply
some hinting based on that flag.

For what the hinting is, well.. I only know what it can't be, it can't
be the same that disabled (greyed out) items have. That would be
misleading.

> But then we still have all the other toolkits indeed.

Consistency (common guidelines) would be a key factor here too.

--
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi
Powered by http://movial.fi