URL:
<http://gna.org/patch/?5704>
Summary: Meta ticket: Improve client user friendliness.
Project: Freeciv
Submitted by: sveinung
Submitted on: Sun 11 Jan 2015 04:40:09 PM UTC
Category: client
Priority: 5 - Normal
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Originator Email:
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
Planned Release:
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Details:
Many new users expects to be able to right click a unit and make the unit do
something (and get more information) from a menu that pops up. They is also
expected that other things, like getting more info about the tile, is possible
by right clicking it. A user may give up when this doesn't work.
In the Gtk clients and the Qt client the user makes a unit do something by
first selecting the unit and then going to the window menu item. This is hard
to discover.
In the SDL clients the user selects the unit before pressing one of the
buttons that just popped up at the button of the screen. Since the buttons do
pop up in stead of having to be actively looked for in the menus they are more
discoverable than window menu items. A user may still miss that something
changed at the button of the screen. His eyes are probably focused on the unit
he is selecting, not the area that changed. This could be fixed by an
animation moving from the unit to the buttons appearing at the button of the
screen but I suspect that it quickly would get annoying.
In the freeciv-web client a menu pops up on left click. This is extremely easy
to discover. Personally I like the approach of using left click for a common
thing like open city dialog or, if no city at the tile, select a unit and
right click for the menu of everything better. When the menu pops up on left
click it forces experienced user to always move the mouse and select an
action. (There may be a way around this in freeciv-web that I'm not aware of)
A down side of not doing it is that a new user may have intended to do
something else.
A right click menu could be added to the Qt client and the Gtk clients without
removing the window menu items current users are familiar with. Adding such a
menu will make new users even less inclined to look in the window menus. Until
it can do everything it will therefore make the things in it even less
discoverable.
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