Re: [Usability] Text-editing widget, attempt 2

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_ freenet de>]

On Wed, 2010-07-21 at 10:59 -0500, Stéphane Maniaci wrote:

> Yes, for the moment I'm implementing those styling capabilities as
> Interfaces, which means (I guess you're all programmers, but in doubt)
> that every object that implements it, whatever is its type, gains the
> ability to draw shadow. So yes I'm doing it in a Interface stack way.

I guess we're not all programmers and would count myself only as half at
most :)


> > A central question to your project should be: how and where exactly do
> > you want to improve on Impress or Powerpoint?
> 
> For the moment, I guess we just want a solid presentation editor, not
> even trying to do better. But we have some cool features and ideas,
> like the Flickr fetcher or a dynamic ruler, like the ones seen in
> Pencil (sketching) or Gaphor.

Reasonable. Still, you should define a project vision, which might
encompass your audience, the tasks they would use this for, the
environments it will be used in ...

Just adding "cool" features is dangerous regarding the user experience,
though I understand that it's fun to implement.


> > "X" and "Y" make me think, "Horizontal" and "Vertical" much less so. You
> > can avoid repetition by changing "Position" to "Offset".
> 
> Thought about this, but do you think it's the same for the average
> user ? I think X & Y might bring people back to school, correct me if
> I'm wrong. Second remark, maybe having a long word next to the
> spinbutton looks better than a single letter ?

I'm not sure we understood each other here, so let me expand:

Confronted with "X" and "Y", it costs me some mental effort to determine
which way around the directions are. I have to bring up a mental picture
of a graph and tend to remain unsure. I assume that I'm not alone with
that.

But if I read "Vertical" and "Horizontal", there's only a minimal
translation effort to the referenced concepts.

Of course showing it graphically beats even those labels. To keep the
layout simple, you could use a vertical and a horizontal line with a dot
on top/left and an arrow head on bottom/right in place of text labels
(or perhaps in addition, if necessary for a11y).


> I changed that in my current, unfinished implementation.

Cool.

> Thanks for your feedback!

You're welcome!


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/