Hi Tim,
On 13 Mar 2010, at 06:40, Tim McNamara wrote:
Hi all,
A few thoughts on the version of Write which I cloned today.
H1 ... H4
Do we know how these term has been received by the education sector?
No, but more generally, the real push for the new toolbar design landed to
solve the very common complaint/feedback that folks could not always work out
how to stop an activity, they would often get lost in some other text tabs, and
end up going to home view and launch a new (duplicate) activity instance. The
new toolbar always shows the Stop icon whatever other toolbars you have
visible. The old text tabs use of text meant a higher literacy level was
needed, cause additional translation effort, and were quite thin mouse click
targets to hit.
I wonder if we could change the string literals to something like Major
heading Subheading Minor heading. I haven't got too much experience
with teaching children in a classroom, but this is closer the language I
remember from school. H1 ... H4 seems like something that HTML created.
The graduating line thickness of each, and position of the H1 H4 were
meant to help ;-) I agree the reference to H is not great; unfortunately
nothing better came up at the time. Write really was the worst case in terms of
toolbar migration from the old text only tabs to full icons. Icons need to be
as language/translation agnostic as possible so we should avoid string
literals, unless each local is willing to create custom svg content (I was
trying to avoid latin characters where possible, but that gets tough for most
text processing functions).
Very happy to see refinement/replacement ideas!
Export
Great feature! Would be great to rotate the arrow on this icon outwards to
match the word :)
FWIW there are several approaches to exposing Export functionality. Some
backstory: In the old Sugar toolbar design, export was hidden as sub items
under the Keep icon – but no one really seems to understand the Keep feature
correctly (most folks think, and try to use it as Keep a copy), so
overloading that misconceived functionality with export was a pretty confusing
mental model... So, with the new toolbars export is showing up in the Activity
toolbar either; 1) as a single uncoloured Journal icon with arrow pointing
towards journal, holding a palette of export formats; 2) as separate 'document'
icons (with arrow pointing towards document) for each export format supported
(see Walter's TurtleArt). I rather like option 2 and may well move some
activities over to that more explicit visual design.
Insert/Delete Row
I would have + - visual indicators, rather than simply arrows.
Yes, I'd hoped to have found something better here also (ran out of time),
however the arrows do at least show the direction the rest of the cells move in
when making changes. Perhaps there's a way to combine both?
That is all. If you're interested, I could probably submit SVGs for review to
deal with the last two points.
Love to see more icon treatments bounced about, happy to see quick
sketches/doodles (easier than building full Sugar HIG correct SVGs every time).
Thanks for the feedback!
Regards,
--Gary
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