On Fri, 30 Dec 2005, Joachim Noreiko wrote: > Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2005 11:51:06 +0000 (GMT) > From: Joachim Noreiko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: Gnome usability <[email protected]> > Subject: [Usability] Right-alignment of labels > > Whether to right-align text labels was recently a > topic of discusssion here. [1] > Was a decision taken on this in the end?
Far as I am concerned Right Alignment should almost always be used with only very rare exceptions. No change there. Others feel differently. The exceptions in guidelines are so big you could drive a truck through them. As Matthew Thomas (mpt) effectively claimed the guidelines can be read in such a way as to allow you to do whatever you want, but I believe this goes against the spirit of the guidelines although admittedly it often difficult to figure out the nebulous intentions of the original authors. > I ask because the proposed changes to the Nautilus > file properties dialog switch the labels from > right-aligned to left-aligned. [2] > > [1] > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00081.html > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00144.html > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00154.html > > [2] > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00285.html > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=325024 How can we expect anyone to follow this guidelines if Nautilus declines to, and guidelines no one follows very quickly become worthless. There are places where the old design may have followed the guidelines too rigidly and I believe there is room to design a better dialog within the constrainsts of the guidelines. (The use of bold labels seems over zealous, if I recall corrrectly they are not intended for all labels just headings.) Please do not use left aligned labels. Please do keep trying. I'm quite interested how the properties dialog in nautilus looks so different from the properties dialog for a shortcut (launcher). The suggested design reminds me a little of the Get Info dialog in Mac OS (eqivalent to properties) especially with the icon on the top left. === Permissions: chmod a+r === Please make sure the permissions are labelled Owner Group All Others (Any others?) If users ever go on to learn the underlying commands it could help avoid some confusion and help them guess the difference between chmode o+r and chmod a+r. Ideally we can guide users with little hints without necessarily exposing them to excessive implementation details. Who are the target users of this dialog and what are the expected use cases? With such information we would be better able to optimize the base case (make the basics easy) and make sure we also provide enough control for advanced users in some other way (make the difficult possible). I expect the biggest use case might be making sure a file was readable by others, especially files in a web folder. Perhaps the number view and text view information might be better presented in some other way? The special flags are interesting but certainly not self explanatory and I wonder it the current design is perhaps too heavily influenced by chmod. Tough problem to solve, especially since many people will have opinions on it. I would urge the developers to test new designs as best they can before committing to a new design (on ordinary as well as heavy users). Best of luck and Happy New Year. Sincerely Alan Horkan Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
