Here's are some ideas off the top of my head. 1) Don't nuke the promotion popup completely; just change it to look and work like the popup menus for placing a piece in Edit Position mode. That is, if you are doing a click/click move, the second click brings up a normal popup menu (not a dialog box full of buttons) with the cursor already over Queen, so one more click without moving the mouse selects Queen. If you are doing a drag/drop move, the drop can pop up the menu, so again it is only one click without moving the mouse.
(It would also be cool to change the menus for both this and Edit Position so that they are graphical instead of text. I seem to remember you were thinking about doing that for the Edit Position menus already....?) 2) Or, a variant on (1), pop up the menu even sooner: In click/click, pop it up as soon as the mouse is over a square on the last rank (and pop it back down automatically if the mouse moves off both the menu and the square). In drag/drop, pop it up as soon as the piece is hovering over the last rank. The problem with this idea is that the user may overshoot and move off of "Queen" when he doesn't intend to, though. So maybe you have to wait until the mouse seems to have stopped moving: If the user does the drop or final click before the menu has popped up, then he gets a queen. If the user hovers the mouse over the square for a second without moving or doing the final drop/click, then he gets a promotion menu. On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Eric Mullins <[email protected]> wrote: > On 4/8/2011 4:38 PM, Arun Persaud wrote: >>> >>> I think this should not be an issue at all. I think it is really bad >>> policy >>> to tailor our design to people who are to lazy to read the manual. >>> This is supposed to be an advances feature. >> >> I don't agree... I think this would be a great default feature and I >> also think we should be able to come up with a userinterface that works >> for everyone... and I agree that people should read the manual, but the >> reality is that only a very small percentage will actually do it... > > I agree. I think it is good to design for people who don't read the manual. > A little up front thought is worth it for everyone involved. > >
