Re: [Usability] ʽextraneous textʼ in dialogs

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 17:21 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Mariano [ISO-8859-1] Surez-Alvarez wrote:
> 
> > Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:08:47 -0300
> > From: "Mariano [ISO-8859-1] Surez-Alvarez"
> <msuarezalvarez arnet com ar>
> > To: GNOME Usability List <usability gnome org>
> > Subject: [Usability] [utf-8] ^ ^Xextraneous text^ ^Y in
> >     dialo[utf-8] gs
> >
> > Hi all,
> 
> > What's the current stance on things like
> > <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143592> and
> > <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143594>?
> 
> Both of those bugs refer to explantory text in brackets after a
> sentence
> in dialogs (it definately looks kind of ugly), specifically in Gnome
> Terminal.
> 
> I think rephrasing to take things out of brackets would help, possibly
> reorgansing the interface to be more self explanatory.  Since these
> are
> essentially tips it would make sense to put them in tooltips.  (Which
> is
> pretty much what dobey said.)
> 
> It would be a shame of Gnome Terminal was unable to follow the style
> of
> other Gnome applications but it is something of a special case.

Of the five cases pointed out in these two reports, only three
are providing parenthetical information on a particular label.
Of those three, one uses the parenthetical to clarify meaning,
while the other two use the parenthetical to provide examples.

The remaining two cases are stand-alone blocks which provide
auxiliary information.  In fact, there's another such string
in the profile editor that neither bug report mentions: under
the "Colors" tab, we have

  Terminal applications have these colors available to them.

I simply don't understand this idea that we can't have a small
amount of explanatory text inside preference dialogs.  The text
helps users, does not occupy an inordinate amount of space, and
does not get in the way for people who already know what's going
on.  Why remove them?

--
Shaun