[850] in Athena User Interface
Sawfish capplet usability
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Fri Aug 3 03:02:11 2001
Message-Id: <200108030702.DAA19396@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2001 03:02:03 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
So I was doing a bit of research on Sawfish both to answer Bill and
Heather's questions, and so I could file accumulated bug reports on
Sawfish. I came across bug #4365 (bugzilla.eazel.com) "Need HI expert
to look at configuration capplet/tool". (Capplets are the top-level
items in Control Center.) So, I went through and filed a bunch of
suggestions which I logged as dependencies of this bug. I'm sharing
them here to avoid duplication of effort.
[8455] Terminology in configuration tool
- "Matched Windows" is not the most intuitively obvious title for new
users. Perhaps "Special Cases" or "Application-Specific" or
"Customize Apps" would be clearer.
- "Shortcuts" is not the most intuitively obvious title for new
users. Perhaps "Bindings" or "Keyboard/Mouse" or "Key/Mouse
Bindings" would be clearer.
- "Meta" is not the most intuitively obvious title for new users.
Perhaps "Advanced Options" would be clearer.
- In the "Appearance" section, "Default frame style" is probably not
the most intuitively obvious label for new users. Perhaps "Default
window decoration style" would be clearer. Actually, replacing the
term "frame" with something more familiar, like "decorations" in
all user-visible locations might be advisable.
[8456] Configuration tool should give immediate feedback
- In the "Appearance" section when running in Control Center, when
you select a new theme under "Default frame style", the
corresponding tab for that theme does not immediately appear at the
top of the window. It does appear after you hit OK to close the
capplet, and then go back into it again. Users trying out new
themes would most likely not know that they are further
configurable. Also, tabs which are no longer needed do not go away
when a different theme is chosen.
- Changes to the "show variable names of each customization option"
in the Miscellaneous section option do not take effect when the
users pushes "Try" when running in Control Center.
- In the "Meta" section when running in Control Center, there is a
pull-down menu titled "Buttons shown in configurator". This has no
effect in this environment and is somewhat confusing. It should be
removed from this display, or at the least only displayed to
"Expert" users.
[8457] Clarity in configuration tool
- The Context pulldown menu in the Shortcuts section is easy for new
users to miss. Perhaps a selectable list of some sort would reduce
confusion.
- The "Grab" feature under Control Center -> Sawfish -> Shortcuts ->
Edit is unable to capture double, triple, etc. clicks. It is not
intuitively obvious that manually entering "Button1-Click2" is the
right thing to do.
[8458] Navigation in configuration tool
- In the Shortcuts section, when viewing as a "Novice" user, none of
the options displayed seem particularly useful in isolation, and
should probably be removed. In particular, the "Context:"
pull-down menu is empty and appears to be malfunctioning.
- The "Miscellaneous" tab in the Miscellaneous section has way too
many options when viewed as an "Expert" user. (It causes my
gnomecc window to be resized to nearly the entire screen height.)
It should be split into multiple tabs, perhaps arranged around the
following themes: Windowshading, Stacking, Root Window Menu, Other.
- The "show variable names of each customization option" should be
moved from the Miscellaneous section to the Meta section.
- The following options should be moved from the Expert level to
Intermediate, for consistency:
- The full list of contexts in the Shortcuts section
- "Number of milliseconds before removing tooltips" in
Miscellaneous -> Tooltips
[8459] "Default frame style" menu hard to manipulate
- In the "Appearance" section when running in Control Center, you
cannot select a new theme by clicking on the down arrow next to the
"Default frame style" field, releasing, and then clicking on your
theme of choice. Instead, you must click on the down arrow, hold
down the button, and drag the mouse to the desired theme.
[8460] Font color is difficult or impossible to change
- In most themes, there is no way to change the color of text
displayed in titles. New users looking at the Appearance page
would probably expect to be able to do this from the "Browse"
button on the main screen, rather than from the theme-specific
customization page, where the option actually exists for the smaker
theme. Sun also commented on this task in their usability test.
See:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/customization_tasks.html
In general, I would expect this simple and very user-visible
parameter to be easy to change. I realize this may be a difficult
chance, since the option to change the font color currently appears
to be left up to the theme creator. Perhaps this could continue to
be the case, but with a general facility to allow the user to
override the theme's choice.
===============================================================
Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
The Talk of MIT ** http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html
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