[217] in Athena User Interface
Re: Usability testing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brad Thompson)
Wed Jun 21 14:55:09 2000
Message-Id: <200006211855.OAA21103@alice-whacker.mit.edu>
To: beland@MIT.EDU
cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 21 Jun 2000 11:22:03 EDT."
<200006211522.LAA25094@w20-575-42.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 14:55:04 -0400
From: Brad Thompson <yak@MIT.EDU>
> - Right-click to get pulldown menu is not obvious enough; add button
> instead. Make it stay on top for very narrow windows, so they can
> be closed, minimized, maximized, etc. intuitively.
It is obvious enough. Users know "right-click to get context menu".
This is ingrained into Windows users, and many Unix users know it, too.
And if that isn't good enough, if they are in a situation where the
menu would come up if they right-clicked, a tooltip comes up telling
them how to get it.
In any case, there is nothing on the popup menu that more than 5% of
the users need that is not availible elsewhere.
> - Hard to move applications if titlebar is not visible
> (Better: Sides move, corners resize.)
Yes, I know. But after sifting through ~200 themes, _none_ do this right.
I have a prototype that I wrote myself, but bringing it up the the level
of polished-ness that we want will take time.
Once again, if the users are confused, a tooltip comes up and tells them
to press mouse button 2 and move the mouse to move the window.
> - Meta-drag fails to move windows
Huh? This is a bug?
> - E.g. "Button-1" is much less intelligible than "Left mouse button"
True. That is not useful though.
"double click with first mouse button" is better than "Button1-Click2",
and I have thought about hacking the tooltip generation code to do this
transform. For the record, there are no bindings in sawfish as I have
configured it that use double or triple clicks.
> - Raise, move, etc. should be on titlebar pulldown menu
Raise is. Move is not (why should it be?). Some values of "etc" are.
For the sake of debate, the menu currently has "raise", "lower",
"iconify", "maximize", "unmaximize", "close", "close forcibly", "frame
style", and "frame type".
> - Should clicking on an icon in the tasklist iconify or raise?
Iconify? Why would it do _that_?
yak
