On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 18:36 +0200, Thorsten Wilms wrote: [...] > My buttons however need something to differentiate groups of mutually > exclusive options.
Years ago, the "open look" approach would have been two-fold... First, an exclusive-choice widget, most likely a drop-down list in your example because of the relatively long text. Open look had clearer guidelines on indicating exclusivity for buttons -- if you could only make one choice, the buttons touched, with a straight border; if you could make multiple selections they were further apart, with the shaded/3d border applied individually. Second, choosing one of the options for your networking example would change the set of visible controls in a single lower area, between the choice and the cancel/reset/reset-to-factory/apply buttons. The all-choices-visible-at-once approach favoured today has a number of advantages, including the fact that the user has enough information to make a better choice at the start without having to try all the options. "Progressive disclosure" was a US design fad in the 1980s that turned out to be a mistake if over-applied. The disadvantage of all-choices-visible is two-fold. First, dialogue boxes the size of an aircraft carrier, which dont work at all on smaller (e.g. mobile) devices. Second, the controls we have available don't really lend themselves well to this approach, as you've discovered. Microsoft for a while experimented with nested tabbed notebook widgets, which was a disaster. You can still see them in the Network control panel in Windows 98 and XP, for example. In your network example, though, maybe getting rid of the Proxy Configuration / Advanced Configuration distinction would be a useful start. There's no reason that an advanced user would not need to configure a proxy and the label gives no clue as to what's there, so probably most people will feel they need to look at it, or that they should ask someone else whether they are allowed in there. Really, your choices are, Proxy: automatic / manual / not needed I imagine (hope) this is part of network profiles, so the user can easily switch between being at home and at the office and on the road, without losing settings or having to re-enter proxies each evening. Typographically, the really ugly and heavy text input boxes most gtk themes force upon us become the strongest element in any design, so you should consider aligning the autoconfiguration box with the others on the left. An unfortunate consequence of using indenting to indicate the hierarchy is the variable distance between the labels and the entry boxes - right-aligning at the colon would be the obvious graphic-design fix, with putting the labels on the extreme right instead of the left being a possible alternative. If you aligned the Autoconfiguration URL properly, the silliness of the left-aligned labels would be even more obvious, unfortunately. It's what you get when engineers try to do graphic design :-) but OK I'll stop ranting. The upshot of all this is that I think the problem is not in fact that there's no direct link between the radio buttons in http://thorwil.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/net_proxy.png but rather that you're using layout to indicate too many things at once, and some of them are conflicting with each other. Try putting the 3 choices at the top, in a group, and all the controls in a single group. (I don't actually see why you can't use an autoconfiguration URI and then override, say, the ftp proxy manually, by the way, but this is really just an example) Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
