Re: [Usability] Mousetweaks usability discussion

[Denis Washington <dwashington gmx net>]

On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 18:24 +0100, Jens Granseuer wrote:
> On 31.10.2007 14:54, Denis Washington wrote:
> > I have made a mockup that integrates Mousetweaks settings into the mouse
> > capplet:
> > 
> > http://ultimum-projekt.de/mockups/mouse.html
> > 
> > I hope I haven't forgotten everything. Comments?
> 
> You forgot to tell that you've made a mockup for keyboard, too:
> 
> http://ultimum-projekt.de/mockups/keyboard.html
> 
> And I think I'm in love. ;-)
> 
> Seriously, I really like these mockups, and apart from a few minor
> easily fixable nitpicks, I think there is only one bigger issue
> (that Denis already mentioned): the Notifications window.
> 

First of all, thanks for your positive yet constructive feedback. :)

> But let's do it in order (CC'ing the MouseTweaks guys, too):
> 
> MOUSE
> 
> Mouse
> 
> * Does it make sense to have a "Mouse" tab in the "Mouse
> capplet? I'd hope all the tabs in their are about the mouse.
> Maybe "General" would be better here (same for Keyboard).
> 

Yeah, naming the tabs "General" makes more sense. I just took the
headings from the current capplets for now, but I would agree to change
those labels.

> Accessibility
> 
> * "Maybe we can remove the "enable mouse a11y" checkbox and
>    implicitly activate the mousetweaks daemon if one of the a11y
>    features is actually turned on?"
> 
> I hope we can get the MouseTweaks daemon merged with g-s-d.
> That would automatically make this box unnecessary. If that
> doesn't happen, I'd agree that activating it implicitly is
> the way to go (just like it's currently done with typing
> break, fwiw).

Having MouseTweaks integrated into g-s-d would indeed be cool. That
wouldn't even mean that MouseTweaks would only work for GNOME 2.22; at
least since 2.20 g-s-d also allows third-party modules IIRC.

> * "Simulated Right Click"
> 
> Does this and the related labels change when I have a
> left-handed setup? We'd either need to do that (though I
> don't know if it's even possible without having the window
> change size) or use something like the current MouseTweaks
> UI seems to do: "primary" and "secondary button". Not that
> great, either, but better than wrong, I guess.

"Simulated Secondary Button" is probably the way to go. Changing the
label depending on the mouse handness is a bad idea as this makes the
label less re-recognizable when changing from left- to right-handed.

> KEYBOARD
> 
> Keyboard
> 
> * "Cursor blinks in text boxes and fields"
> 
> Do people know what the difference is between a box and a field? I
> know I always confuse the two. Does it matter? Can't we just shorten
> it to "Cursor blinks in text fields"?

I think the only difference is that text boxes are multi-line. But I
also think that distiguishing the two isn't necessary in this label; I'm
interested in other comments about this though.

> Layouts
> 
> * The buttons without icons look odd, and different from the ones
>    with icons. We should try to fix that.

IMO the text field and the "Choose..." button should go away and be
replaced with a button labeled with the keyboard model. That way it
would be kind of like a font or color chooser button.

For the "Layout Options..." button we need an icon though. I would
propose to have a generic "this button opens up an additional
preferences window" icon, like the cross referencing icon we are already
using.

> Accessibility
> 
> * "Allow turning accessibility features on/off from the keyboard"
> 
> "... on or off... "?
> 

Maybe nicer, yet a tad longer.

> * "simultanous" is missing an "e"

Oops.

> * The "Notifications" window is bad (and contains a few typos),
> but I don't currently have an idea how to fix it, short of moving
> some of the options over to the "Mouse Keys" tab. That would
> require that we come up with a useful way to group them, plus we
> should be careful that features on one tab not affect features on
> another (turning on/off via the keyboard). To me, this is the one
> big issue that needs to be solved to make this one a winner.

As I mentioned, it's not a very good idea but the best I could come up
with. I would be glad if we found a better grouping.

> Mouse Keys
> 
> * not sure I like the link to the mouse capplet

AFAIK the mouse keys feature uses some of the generic mouse options,
like pointer acceleration. That's why I think a link makes sense.

> * "Mouse Keys" tab has a "Mouse Keys" header, "Typing Break"
>    (correctly, IMO) does not

We could make the top-level checkbox bold like in the Typing Break tab,
that would probably be better than a "Mouse Keys" header.

> 
> Overall, great work. Thanks for persisting. ;-)

Thank you. :)

Cheers,
Denis