Re: [Usability] GtkNotebook scrolling

[Diego Moya <turingt gmail com>]

There are at least two ways to prevent users being confused by this feature, without removing it completely:

- Provide a more prominent visual feedback when it's activated, so that if it's by accident the user will understand what happened. Instead of just an instant unexpected change of the complete panel, show a sliding animation over the tabs that brings attention to them and explain that they're being changed.

- Guard the feature with a modifier key so that it can't be activated by accident. If you have to use ALT+Scrollwheel to activate this quick scrolling through tabs, it's far less likely that its usage is unintended, and the user will have a clue that something special is happening because of the pressed key.

On 12 March 2010 11:35, Allan Day wrote:

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
Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/

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