On Wed, 18 May 2005, Luis Villa wrote: > Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 20:36:21 -0400 > From: Luis Villa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: Alan Horkan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [Usability] online/offline design > > On 5/18/05, Alan Horkan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Wed, 18 May 2005, Luis Villa wrote: > > > > > Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 18:47:40 -0400 > > > From: Luis Villa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > To: [email protected] > > > Subject: [Usability] online/offline design > > > > > > Hey, all- > > > > > > I was wondering if anyone had given thought to designing a standard > > > 'you're not online, so action X could not be completed [configure > > > network][dismiss][cry in shame]' dialog for if/when apps start to poke > > > networkmanger for that information? Or if such a thing would be > > > appropriate?
> I was, uh, trying to be a bit less grand in scope :) Obviously it > would be nice to catch some of these things and think through them, > but I'm more concerned with the concrete-and-fixable-RIGHT-NOW issue, > which is 'we have a way to tell if a machine is online/offline, and we > have many apps which should fail gracefully if they are offline. What > should they say when they fail?' So, uh, any suggestions? :) Part of the problem is getting enough context to ask the right question. Do we have enough information to distinguish the various types of users and know the difference between a users that is temporarily offline or for example a user that has not configured any kind of a network connection yet? For dial-up users the obvious thing to do is ask them to connect to the Internet. They should probably only be automatically asked once per session and be expecated to manually request a connection otherwise. For workstation users the problem is more likely to be wires disconnected or misconfigured settings whereas for laptop users the connection might simply be unavailable for a while. I suppose it should be possible to tackle a specific aspect of this problem and do something sensible, particularly if you can gather enough relevant information and avoid showing the dialog in the wrong context. Maybe a description of your specific use case could be used as a rough archetype/persona for the laptop user and from there we could see about making sure the dialog is only shown at the right time and when it is really relevant. Sincerely Alan Horkan Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
