On Monday, July 28, 2003, at 09:01 AM, Dar Scott wrote:
Well, certainly to some extent it's a matter of personal taste. Study after study has shown that *most* users do not react to things the way you do. (The fact that you're a programmer/Rev user probably already indicated that!)I prefer a setup panel show me what it can do rather than make me tease it out of it. My brain can easily skip over a block of disabled controls. Even when I look at them, they provide information about the nature of that checkbox or radio button.
But I don't think I was quite clear in my original post, either.
Progressive realization is appropriate when there are some choices which are simply not relevant until and unless the user makes some choice elsewhere in the user experience. In the specific case I was looking at, there was a setting on the QuickTime property sheet that was only relevant at very low modem connection speeds. High-speed modems and broadband connections need not concern themselves with this checkbox. So my design choice would be to hide the checkbox and show it *only* if the user chose a low-speed connection from the popup menu. Another example of this kind of progressive realization in UI design is when there are two popups, the contents of one of which depends on the user's selection in the other. We do not as a rule default to providing every possible alternative in the second popup menu. Rather, we either hide or disable it (or, my preference, set its contents to a default string that makes it clear that it will be populated when the first popup has been set) until the user makes a choice from the first popup menu.
I fully agree with you that it makes no sense to have *relevant* UI controls hidden so that the user has to sort of "unlock the puzzle" to get at them. "Discovery" is the operative word; the user should discover the new options if and as they become relevant to the task s/he wants to accomplish.
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