Hi! This is my first e-mail to the usability list, although I've been hanging around GNOME for quite a while.
First some background on the situation: When translating some apps into Swedish, I noticed some strings had triple dots (...) after them. Turned out - most of them were in the menus. Since I had never thought about their existence, I decided to find out what they meant. By looking at different apps, I couldn't consistently find the common denominator of the actions that had the three dots. A google search showed that in both Microsoft and Apple Human Interface Guidelines, these three dots symbolize that the action needed additional data to be entered, most likely opening a new window for that data. As a result - "Save As..." has this, and "Save" doesn't. The three dots are also referred to as an ellipsis character, and can be typed in as a single unicode character instead of three actual dots. When trying to prove this to myself in GNOME, I looked at some of the most used apps (gedit, eog, nautilus, epiphany, terminal), and notice that they all treat this rule a bit differently. Where one app had the three dots, another would not. There were even some inconsistencies within the apps themselves. Just look around the File menu of the mentioned apps and notice how they all treat things like Print, Save as, Open differently. Another way is looking at different apps doing the same things - KDE, Firefox etc, the differences areWhen it comes to less obvious actions it seems arbitrary in many cases, whether the ellipsis will be used or not. Another easy way of noticing the differences in interpretation of the ellipsis is by looking at menus of two apps that do the same thing. Me not having noticed their existence at all before, I asked around friends and family - all computer users, but not leet in any way whether they new these things were there. The answer was just like I thought - nobody knew they existed. And everyone could work just fine without them. So - what to do about these little things, that have been around since the days of Win3.1 (and probably much earlier)? As I see it, there's three ways to go: * Remove them completely. State in the HIG that they shouldn't be used. * Define more clearly exactly when they should be used, and file bugs for each app and occasion of wrongful use. This will probably result in quite a lot of bugs * Do nothing. Status quo remains. What I think (and this is where I say I'm in no means an expert in the area), it that we should go with removing them entirely from the GNOME HIG, and GNOME itself. My reasons for this are the following: * Most people don't notice them, and aren't helped by them. * The people that do notice them might be confused by them. * They are probably not translatable into all languages. * They waste space (both disk space, and screen space) * The use of the ellipsis is totally inconsistent between apps, and largely depend on the author. Sometimes it's even inconsistent within an app itself. * The use of three dots to indicate a dialog opening seems rather oldfashioned - can't we have something better now? * In some cases, they hinder the reuse of the same string for multiple purposes, causing extra translation work. If people really feel that they do in fact fill some purpose, shouldn't there at least be some kind of icon or something that is international to indicate the opening of a new window? What do you people think? Am I totally off here? Best regards Sergej Kotliar PS: please CC me, cause I'm not subscribed to this list. _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
