On 25/03/2008, Martin Schmidkunz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi everybody, > > after some discussion and work I would like to present a first draft of > a YaST style guide to you: > http://en.opensuse.org/Image:Ysg.pdf > > The intention of the style guide is NOT to dictate every pixel in every > module but to make some basic actions and behaviors consistent which > increases usability.
The styleguide does highlight one of my pet peeves with YaST modules - The overviews. Illustration of the problem with the example in the styleguide: http://bw.uwcs.co.uk/b/styleguide_overview.png How overviews can look using a listview instead of a table: http://bw.uwcs.co.uk/b/listbox_overview.png All the overviews at the moment are in my opinion overusing table widgets, to display lists of items. These lists are nearly always of very small numbers of items. Using table widgets here makes the dialogues appear crowded by a) encouraging putting too much information horizontally, b) Crowding all information into top left hand corner. KDE and GNOME are both increasingly using listviews rather than tables in situations like the YaST overview dialogues. The listviews offer a) bigger hit target for each item in the list. b) Forces designer to not overload each item with information (If more information needs to be displayed it can be displayed in a second row in a less bold font). At the moment some modules have almost all the information from the detailed information box also duplicated in each row of the table. My question is, will the styleguide force people to continue to design ugly user interfaces because "I am only following the styleguide", rather than improving things. I can see the benefit of using consistent interfaces everywhere, but not when it forces people to use consistently bad interfaces everywhere. -- Benjamin Weber -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
