[Usability] Usability problems with the new fullscreen mode for cheese!

[Felix Kaser <f kaser gmx net>]

Hey usability guys!

We implemented a fullscreen mode for cheese (who has not seen it yet, 
check it out :D)! But now some usability issues appeared! I hope some of 
you know cheese and have seen the fullscreen mode too! There we have a 
bar, which appears when the user moves the mouse to the bottom of the 
screen! But cheese has two modes: the live preview mode where you see 
the live video from the cam and the effects chooser mode where you can 
select effects to be applied!

In the first mode (preview) the bar overlays a little bit of the preview 
video, but thats not that bad, because its just some 5% of the image! 
The problem is the second mode (effects chooser), there the bar overlays 
a set of buttons (the last row of effect buttons). To not bother the 
user with the bar too much in the effects mode we set the timeout (when 
the bar disappears) to 1sec or less, so you see the bar only if you move 
the mouse to the bottom of the screen and remain on the bar! when you 
move the bar away from the bar it disappears immediately! The timeout 
for the bar in the preview mode is set to 5sec, thats similar to other 
applications like eog and so on!

Now the maintainer of cheese, daniel, asked me: why don't use 2 or 3 
seconds for both modes? ask the usability guys he said and thats what 
I'm doing :)

So after the long story: do you think its better to have 2 different 
ways of doing this or its better to have kind of a trade-off and use one 
timeout for both modes? That means overlaying the last row of effects 
buttons for some 2, 3sec....

Can you help us with that?

Ah and before I forget: It all started with bug #548546
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548546

Cheers and thanks in advance for the help
felix