2005/9/19, Matthew Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I'd also put the recipient fields underneath the message body, on the > grounds that sometimes you're not sure exactly who a message is > appropriate for until you've finished it.
Even with the valid example, an argument stating that "sometimes it's like this" does not sound that encouraging. Sometimes I decide to go to bathroom, but that doesn't mean I should always sit there with my laptop just in case... What I think are the three most important factors when placing UI components are: - What is most used - What is the logical order of things - What are the relations of said components All of these are not enough to decide here though: - All of the fields (to:, subject, body) should be filled in all messages - There is little or no logical difference between "this message from him about that", "from him and about that the message is this"[1] - They all relate about the same way to each other So, what should decide the ordering? For the first two (to:[2] and subject) I see no big reasons for one way or another, but for keeping the message body last there is the notion that it's the one expanding rather lot vertically (in reality it doesn't as it's scrolled of course, but the user most likely wants to resize the window sometimes) and this would mean that the elements in the bottom will always be located depending on the window size. If the fields are on the top of the window, there less movement as they won't go anywhere when the window is resized. This is probably more than 0,2c, but you can keep the change. [1] I like when I can create a sentence from an UI, it means that it has at least some level of logic in it. [2] Ok, so it could be three or four if you count cc and bcc but I consider them grouped with to: which is only logical way to handle them in my opinion -- Kalle Vahlman, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Powered by http://movial.fi _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
