Re: [Usability] combo box guidelines?

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 21:16 -0400, Jacob Beauregard wrote:
> forgot the image.. hope that 83kb won't kill anyone's inbox.

FWIW, the equivalent control on OS X behaves the same way (apart from
the big space at the bottom).  Personally I suspect that consistency
offered by this behaviour probably *is* the right thing to do, on
balance, even if it does require the user to do a bit of extra work when
it pops up near the edge of the screen.

Having said that (and I remember this discrepancy from the last time we
talked about combo boxes), GNOME 2.18 on my Solaris machine doesn't do
what you're seeing at all-- it adjusts the position of the popup
downwards to fit the screen, so the immediately-selected item isn't the
currently-selected item.  I still don't know why we're seeing different
behaviours.

Assuming what you're seeing is the standard behaviour, I suppose you
could also split the popup into multiple columns rather than just hiding
the rest of the options, which would allow you to maintain the position
of the currently-selected item under the cursor:

------+---------------+---------------+------  <- Top edge of screen
   +--| Option 1      |  Option 3     |---+
   |  | Option 2      |  Option 4     |   |    * = existing selection
   |  |               |  Option 5*    |   |        
   |  +---------------+---------------+   |
   |                         Cancel   OK  |
   +--------------------------------------+

The position of the other column(s) would depend on which edge of the
screen the popup abutted, e.g. if there were too many options below
Option 5 to fit without hitting the bottom, they would be shown in
another column to the right.  Not particularly attractive though, and
obscures parts of the screen (including, most likely, the control's
label) that you might want to see while making your selection.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems