Chi Shang Cheng kirjoitti viestissään (lähetysaika keskiviikko, 31. toukokuuta 2006 22:12): > Hi Marco, > > Here are some usability related comments: > > 2006/5/31, Marco Gusy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: [SNIP] > > I would like you to take a look to this mockup i saw on kde-look.org, > > it's a very interesting and innovative feature that would introduce new > > coherence and usability in desktop applications. [SNIP] > > The second one, the new one, would be a > > communication/information/progress customizable window which would be > > shown in that grouped dialog. > > Grouping all progress dialogs in one panel doesn't make sense. When place > several items together, Gestalt psychology states that people will tend to > perceive these items as related. However, placing all progress dialogs (or > similar dialogs) in one central place has no meaning for the user, since > all those items in that place share no semantic relationship. The items in > that central progress dialog do have a relationship, but it's merely a > technical one, namely that all those windows are progress windows. Since > the items in such a panel share no semantic relationship, but a technical > relationship instead, will the user have enough knowledge to know where to > find the dialogs? User testing would be needed to find out the answer to > that question.
Well IMHO, there is a clear common context to progress dialogs. They all give an answer to the question "What is happening right now?", which IMHO is a pretty important one. Another big benefit IMHO is predictability and containability. With one single place for all progress dialogs you always know where to find any one of them and you can easily minimise and maximise them all at one go. Currently the progress windows aren't connected to anything, which means that they can appear anywhere on the screen (which somehow tends to be right on top of the thing which you were just using), and can end up on any one of your virtual desktops (which isn't particularly fun when you've got 9 desktops full of windows and need to find one progress dialog among them). [SNIP] > Shrinking a whole window into a tiny menu item, means you'll be losing > space that you could use to present information to the user. Besides this > disadvantage, it does has an advantage: shrinking such a window will force > the developer to eliminate all unessential information, which will result > in a much more clean interface. Take a closer look at a current progress window in KDE (or any DE for that matter). Count the area which is actually used to convey information vs. the total size of the dialog (including window frames). I can guarantee that the figure you get won't be very high. So yes, progress windows can be used to convey a lot of information, but currently they really just waste a lot of screen real-estate on visual bureaucracy (i.e. the standard window elements) and thus make it actually harder to focus on the important stuff. Dialog windows are IMHO even worse in this regard. -- Jani-Matti Hätinen _______________________________________________ Appeal mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/appeal
