Mostly we need to put some options in front of
users and see what happens. There are wild
inconsistencies all over the place when it comes
to clickable versus non-clickable.
How do you know you can click on text in the
summary view of your email client? It's just
text. It's not on a button. There's not even a
rollover effect.
How do you know you can click on the numbers in the mini-calendar to navigate?
You know because you try it, something happens and you learn over time.
Forcing every UI element to be on a button or
highly saturated puts a huge burden on the user's
visual processing capacity. The real issue is
that "Greyed out" or "Unclickable" needs to be
represented in some other way (ie. Translucency)
because UIs are getting complex enough that
prohibiting the use of Grey is simply too serious
a handicap.
So an alternate way to look at Apple's use of
grey elements is to say that we are transitioning
into a new paradigm for interaction states and
we're in a painful middle period.
Apple also has a number of grey icons that ARE
clickable that do NOT sit on a button background:
+ Sharing status icon in the sidebar in iCal
+ Replied to, Forwarded icon in Apple Mail
It's going to take a lot of iterations to get
this right, but it shouldn't stop us from trying.
Mimi
At 9:51 AM +0000 2/9/06, Stefan Magdalinski wrote:
Sheila Mooney wrote:
I like the either of the options on the bottom
row (circle or oval). I agree with Philippe
that we need to make sure it's obvious that you
can click on them. We have already received
some dogfooding feedback that they look
disabled. I think the states for the group on
the top right are very difficult to
differentiate.
without wanting to sound too negative, I don't think any of them work.
in all 4 options:
They give *no* hint as to their function, they're insufficiently
different from each other within each group, and even if itunes does it
(wrongly), gray icons means 'disabled' to most users.
And rollovers can be hint, but one can't depend on users having a mouse
to rollover with.
This is possibly one of those instances where 4 words would be worth 100
pictures?
I was going to have a play and make some suggestions but Chandler has
decided it won't start up (see attached)
(I'll file another bug on the fact that the debug text in this dialog
isn't copy and pastable)
stef
Attachment converted: Lamby:chandlerwontstart.png (jÚ/j¤) (0005A19C)
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