Re: [Usability] Resizability of windows

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 3 May 2006, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 00:08:38 +1200
> From: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>
> To: Gnome usability <usability gnome org>
> Subject: [Usability] Resizability of windows
>
> On May 1, 2006, at 10:25 PM, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > ...
> > Frankly I'd like to be able to maximize _every_ window (just about).

First off I didn't want to waste time qualify that statement in great
detai.

> Heh, this brings back memories of the ever-expanding Preferences dialog
> in the Mozilla suite. A developer would add "just one more" checkbox,

> everyone else. Eventually Ben Goodger had to make the dialog
> non-resizable (partly) to save the developers from themselves.

Oh dear, putting constraints in the wrong places.  As I get older I
gain more respect for good management.

The preferences dialog in Mozilla may have been bad but the inflexible and
frequently changing mess in Firefox is worse but that is another story.
(The lack of changes and failure to adequately support standards in
Internet Explorer is annoying but it there is an upside and it is at least
easy to provide techincal support for since the Options dialog has barely
changed in almost a decade.)


Back to the topic at hand: you provide a good list of reasons when it is
particularly useful to be able to expand a dialog.

> The rule I adopted was that a window should be resizable only if
> ∑(wanting to resize it ✕ benefit from doing so) > ∑(resizing it
> accidentally ✕ harm from doing so). So for example:
> *   a window that contains a non-hardcoded list of things is more
>      likely to deserve resizability than one that doesn't;

As I mentioned in the case of the Themes dialog maximising is preferable
to scrolling through a cramped list.

> ball? ... what's a mouse ball?"), and (2) vastly overestimate the
> average person's ability to understand what's happened when they get
> their mouse unstuck

> only to find that a normally-small window is suddenly covering most of
> the screen.

Having a window filled to the whole screen is a strange but mostly
harmless occurance.

> (For a similar example, see the section beginning "One day a friend
> called me up" in
> <http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000059.html>.) But

This doesn't seem very simliar at all but it does serve as a reminder of
how useful it would be if we could rollback things to a last known
good state.

Also this sentence "It took me five minutes over the phone to
figure out what had happened." reveals that Joel isn't very good at
providing technical support over the phone, "Describe what you see" is
about the best question you can ask and keep asking until users provide
the required detail.  (Working tech support is horrible but educational, a
"character building experience" as they say.)

> Having said all that, I don't understand why the Theme Preferences
> window is not a dialog and is resizable, but doesn't become maximizable
> automatically. That looks like too much flexibility in Metacity.

While we are at it there are other dialogs containing long lists where
users would benefit from having a maximize button.  Namely: the Desktop
Background dialog; theme preferences dialog; Keyboard shortcuts dialog;
Gnome screensave.  (I'm using Ubuntu at the moment, not sure if all of
those are in official Gnome.  Incidentally the Sound Preferences dialog is
far too tall.)


Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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