Re: [Usability] Tab consistency

[erik philippo tweakdsl nl]

Oke, let's start a tab consistency standart group. The purpose of the group is
to define a standard tab behavior wich can be used in kde, mozilla and gnome.
Because discussing with a lot of people doesn't work, I like to see two persons
representing each project. Who likes to join the team and represent gnome? Is
Calum Benson interested in this? I will also mail kde, mozilla and
betterdesktop.

I can't find a mail adress of the betterdesktop team or Anna Dirks. Does anybody
know how to contact them?

- Erik Jan


Quoting Jacob Beauregard <jake13jake comcast net>:

> This is one of the problems that faces the modern desktop computer that needs
> to be approached.
>
> First of all, let me state this: Tabs are a list of different documents being
> displayed in a single window. It is a form of navigation within an
> application. People are becoming used to tabs. This makes list views that can
> be more useful less learnable, as people have already learned how to use
> tabs. It's something called familiarity.
>
> When a user makes the switch from a windowed-system like Microsoft's older
> versions of Internet Explorer, the users wanted functionality that was
> familiar to them. This included having a close button on every tab (as they
> had had on every window).  This not only makes the functionality much more
> visible, which I find is the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of usability (keep this
> drilled into your heads please), I don't have to move my mouse around so much
> to close a tab. I also don't have a middle mouse button and find clicking
> both mouse buttons simultaneously to be awkward (once again, familiarity).
>
> Still, considering there are differences that users have with the tabbed
> interface, it is important to let it be flexible. This means the user should
> be able to modify the appearance and behavior of a tabbed interface. Not only
> does this make the interface more flexible, it gives the users more control
> over their environment. While it is obvious that the GNOME community wouldn't
> want to bombard the user with options for everything in one screen, this can
> be controlled by grouping functions in a way that makes sense, not to lack
> possible future innovation in the ways they are displayed.
>
> Being able to recover from doing something stupid is another usability
> must-have. This means you should be able to easily recover from accidentally
> hitting that close button on the tab.
>
> Consistency is another important feature of usability. In this sense, tabs
> are
> out because there are so many different implementations of them. What can be
> done about this? Let's see... how about the GNOME developers, KDE developers,
> and Firefox developers work together? Don't forget to include everyone else
> that employs a tabbed interface.
>
> Still, everyone seems to be interested in tabs and that's where the most
> usability advancements have been occurring. None of these improvements have
> been occurring with any other type of interface that can be used to
> accomplish the same tasks that a tab accomplishes. I would like to see some
> improvement in that area. Just because some functionality isn't right for
> some people doesn't mean that it doesn't work for a lot of people. Having a
> functionality that can be useful and not using it is better than not having a
> functionality at all.
>
> For instance, I'm building a LEGO MindStorms NXT robot for my HCI class with
> someone. We're designing the interface top-down since we can't build the
> final version of the robot yet. In our top-down design, we are including all
> the functionality we might want to use even though it might not be used in
> the final version. Still, we see that there could be some use for it in
> approaching the problem of usability. Different people could build a robot
> that performed the same task using some of the same base functionality that
> we created but didn't end up using. That's pretty much the reason user
> settings were created. We have this, and we find that it could be useful, so
> use it if you want to. When you stray more from the kernel and into the
> higher levels the flexibility/control concepts are less-utilized. At the
> level of a window manager, GNOME should recognize that there is still a lot
> of flexibility and control that can be implemented.
>
> An example of where a tab's usability-improvements could be useful, but not
> necessary: I would like to be able to put min/max/close buttons on my window
> list buttons. No desktop currently makes this directly available to me,
> meaning I'm probably going to write it myself sometime in the near future.
>
> The same concepts that are used in tabs could be applied to any kind of lists
> that can be used for the same purposes. This would also help the familiarity
> level in a user that's using the interface.
>
> In other forms of consistency, it would be good to have a hierarchical
> key-assignment manager. Something that could tell a program "Oh shit, that's
> being used by on a lower level than you, inform the user and ask for a
> different key!" I find key-assignment managers are quite limited these days.
> I also hope someone copies Windows Vista's hierarchical volume controls,
> although I know it will probably be done in the next year.
>
> On Tuesday 27 March 2007 04:57:24 pm Erik Jan Philippo wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> > It's very annoying that all the tab based application behave different. I
> > think we should create a standard for tab behavior at freedesktop. The
> > standard defines mouse and keyboard behavior. Several open source project
> > should collaborate with each other. I suggest mozilla, kde, gnome and
> > novells betterdesktop. The standard should be tested with usability tests
> > (that's why i think betterdesktop.org is usefull). If the standard is
> > defined we should ask as much as possible open source projects (if they use
> > tabs) to implement it. Off course we provide them with the results of the
> > usability research to convince them. If kde, gnome and mozilla agree with
> > it, probable a lot of small programs will also use it. I hope this will
> > lead to a very consistent tab behavior in every open source applications.
> > Before I'm going to spend my time with it, I like to know what you think of
> > it?
> >
> > Ubuntu is also planning tab consistency:
> > https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/tab-consistency
> >
> > There are some problems with this. Terminal use ctrl-shft-t while a lot of
> > tab based programs use ctrl-t. The problem is that nano also use  ctrl-t. I
> > think there will be more complications like this.
> >
> > Greetings,
> >
> > Erik Jan
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Usability mailing list
> > Usability gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
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