Re: [Usability] GtkNotebook scrolling

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi Cody,

> So, I stumbled upon this feature we have where you can use mouse-wheel
> scrolling on GtkNotebook pages to change to a different page.  It wasn't
> the most pleasant experience for me since I did it on accident and was
> briefly quite confused.  I'm not a usability expert by any stretch of
> the imagination, but my gut feeling is that if something confuses me for
> even a moment then it might be a usability flaw for average users.

I've been following your thread on desktop-devel... It's a subtle issue.
A few considerations:

It makes sense that users who do utilise this feature do find it to be
quicker, particularly when they are switching between a large number of
tabs, and it could allow some novel interactions which aren't possible
by other means.

Though most widgets cannot be controlled through the mouse wheel, a
small number can (combo boxes, volume sliders and the window list, for
example), so it's not completely inconsistent to have this behaviour for
tabs.

On the other hand, we need to consider the pain that is caused by this
feature. A few questions here: do users simply run into this by
accident, or are there specific scenarios which cause difficulty? Is
this something that users accidentally encounter once and then learn to
avoid, or is it something that they will repeatedly run into?

Allan
--
IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org
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