[Usability] Control Center Appearance Capplet

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

I'm currently looking at integrating the various appearance settings 
throughout GNOME into a single "Appearance Settings" application for the 
control center.

I have made some mockups, which can be seen here:
http://live.gnome.org/ControlCenter/AppearanceSettings

We've discussed these on the control center mailing list[1] and I would 
like to discuss some of the issues raised here as well.


Themes Tab

The themes tab provides a way of saving and apply a particular group of 
appearance settings. This means it will change the settings on other 
tabs, and this is contrary to advice in the HIG. However, I am not sure 
if the advice in the HIG applies to this, as it is (or should be) fairly 
obvious that changing to a different theme will affect options not shown 
on the current tab.


Close Button

As you can see, there is no separate close button on this window other 
than in the title bar. I know this has been discussed before, but would 
it be impossible to require "GNOME Compliant" window managers to include 
 a close button. My main reason for removing it is because of the Novel 
usability studies that showed[2] several people did not understand that 
the window was instant apply. I think the presence of a dialog-style 
button bar suggests that the window is asking the user for some action, 
when in fact this is not the case.


Dialog Window

Related to the above, I have also not set this window to be a dialog 
window. The window is not asking for any confirmation or action from the 
user, so I think it ought to be a "normal" window. We also had several 
bug reports[3] requesting that the previous theme capplet have maximise 
buttons because in contained a scrollable window. Metacity (quite 
reasonably) does not allow maximise buttons on dialogs, so it had to be 
changed to a normal window.


Undo and Redo

There has been some suggestion on the control center list that we might 
like to include Undo/Redo or Revert buttons in the capplets[4], It would 
be useful to get some input into the usability/accessibility 
implications of such a feature.


Preference Windows

It would be useful to clarify the above points with regards to 
"Preference Windows" in the HIG. The HIG specifies that preference 
windows should be instant apply, but does not specify a particular 
layout to deal with this idiom. Looking at any other operating systems 
where instant apply is often used (primarily Mac OS X), it seems that 
most preference windows do not have any Close button other than that 
provided by the title bar.


Of course, any other comments and suggestions are welcome as well.

Regards,

Thomas


[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnomecc-list/2007-April/msg00000.html
[2] http://www.betterdesktop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Data
[3] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331835
[4] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnomecc-list/2007-April/msg00011.html