[Usability] Re: Icons for document systems

[Bill Wohler <wohler newt com>]

Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 22:50 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 16:43 -0700, Bill Wohler wrote:
> > > Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 15:40 -0700, Bill Wohler wrote:
> > > > > Given a hypertext document reader such as Info, what icons
> > > > > would you suggest for going back and forth in the history,
> > > > > going to the next and previous chapter, going up a section, or
> > > > > going up all the way to the table of contents?
> > > > 
> > > > Info is beyond a hypertext reader.
> > 
> > > Yup, that's why I affixed "document".
> > 
> > Like an HTML Document? :) Perhaps documentation reader would be a
> > better term, and one should throw out hypertext entirely from the
> > sentence.
> 
> What makes the hypertext part relevant is that it adds
> that element of navigation.  The question pertains to
> document viewers that inherently have:
> 
> Structural navigation: Each chunk or page has a parent
> and siblings, and maybe children.  This gives you Up,
> Previous, and Next.  Previous and Next aren't entirely
> well-defined.  Info defines them only for siblings,
> whereas Yelp defines them as the next chunked section
> in document order.  That is, if you read each page and
> always go to the "Next" page in Yelp, you will have
> read the entire document cover-to-cover.

That the info reader does not do that [move to the next chapter after
reading a sub-section] might be considered a bug.

> Temporal navigation: You can read chunks in any order
> you want, and navigate through the list of what you've
> just read.

Exactly. It would be good to keep both structural and temporal
navigation in mind for future icon sets and names (I'm thinking "back"
and "forward" for the temporal icons rather than "left" and "right") to
make it more clear to developers which ones to use for their
application.

> > > >              I would suggest using the same bits that Yelp does,
> > > > which is what should be displaying info under GNOME anyway.
> > > 
> > > Yelp 2.12.2 on my system (Debian (etch)) doesn't have icons for
> > > Next Section, Previous Section, and Contents, and it doesn't even
> > > have an "Up" function, so there aren't really any bits to take.
> > > What icons would Yelp use if it had them? ;-)
> > 
> > It wouldn't, and shouldn't, have icons for multiple levels of
> > navigation, in the same area. That would be quite confusing to me,
> > as a user. Next, Next, and Next?! Yelp doesn't have sections.
> > "Contents" would presumably be the "Home" icon you see, which takes
> > you to the TOC.
>
> At one time (2.10 I think) Yelp used icons for Previous
> and Next, but not in the menus.  It used the icons in
> the navigation footer in the page, much like you see on
> the online GTK+ docs.  It used those arrow-on-page icons
> in Bill's email.

Ah, OK, so at least I had chosen the "correct" icons.

> The "Up" functionality in Yelp is provided by the list
> of parent sections at the top of each page, which is far
> more useful, I think.

Except that you have to scroll to the top to use it. I use `u' in Info
from the bottom of the page a fair bit.

> My guess is that people very rarely use the menu items
> for previous and next section, and use the footer links
> or the TOC sidebar exclusively.

Could be. In info, I use SPC (which scrolls down the page and then to
the next sibling) as well as `n' and `p' to more quickly move to and fro
between the siblings.

> > Info is a bit too complicated in general I think. I actively avoid
> > reading info pages, actually. I've found it basically impossible to
> > actually find the information I want, and to navigate to it. Any
> > chance you could just rewrite the Emacs docs in docbook, and use
> > appropriate documentation output for the system you're installing
> > to?

;-). There's a lot of stuff out there in Texinfo so that's unlikely to
happen.

Note that info, like Docbook, can emit a dazzling number of formats. The
HTML or PDF outputs of both systems could be indistinguishable,
navigation-wise.

> We've wandered way off of the topic of icons, but I like
> talking about information retrieval paradigms. :)

Thanks, Shawn and dobey. To summarize, it seems like there might be an
overhaul (reduction) of the GNOME icons at some point and the next and
previous icons were tried and dissed in Yelp. I think, for now, that
there isn't a compelling enough reason to break the visual metaphor
inherit in the current icons so it might be best not to mess with it
until the GTK/GNOME teams have a better substitute.

Thanks again for the feedback.

-- 
Bill Wohler <wohler newt com>  http://www.newt.com/wohler/  GnuPG ID:610BD9AD
Maintainer of comp.mail.mh FAQ and MH-E. Vote Libertarian!
If you're passed on the right, you're in the wrong lane.