unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Philipp Wendler wrote on 15/04/10 14:18:
>...
> Am 15/04/10 14:15, schrieb Matthew Paul Thomas:
>...
>> But even though (a variation of) that guideline has been around since
>> Windows 95, it hasn't worked out well. Many users have given up on
>> left-clicking on notification area items -- probably, I think, because
>> the left-click action wasn't predictable or memorable enough. Instead,
>> they right-click to get the menu every time. "What? You can left-click
>> on that thing and it does something different from right clicking?
>> Dude, why didn't anybody tell me this? I've been doing it the hard way
>> all this time!"
>> <http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2009/05/01/9581563.aspx>
> 
> For me this shows that it is not worth trying to let the indicators
> behave exactly like a single other UI component. This interaction
> pattern is the same as for almost all icons in Windows (desktop, start
> menu, files in the explorer etc., with toolbars being probably the
> single big exception) and for these icons everybody knows how to use
> it. But indicators look somewhat different and users expect them to do
> something different, so they don't expect indicators to support the
> same interaction pattern.

How do they look different? The only difference I can see is that they
have icons in their titles. So does the Applications menu.

> And I think this is the same for our indicators,
> the users will not expect them to behave exactly like menus, because
> they look different and they are there for a different purpose. So why
> bother restricting the indicators to plain menus?

To make them consistent with each other.

> However, I do not support the "users don't use it, so we don't need to
> implement it" conclusion one might draw from this article. On Windows,
> altough there is this guideline, there is some inconsistency between
> different indicators, and some of the users might have experienced
> unwanted actions to be executed on left click, so they trained
> themselves to only use right click. Also they need to know about the
> right-click menu, because some options are available only there. So
> it's either "know both of them" or "know the right click".

That wasn't the problem: the problem was that the menu was geekier than
people were wanting, because the designers were expecting them to be
left-clicking instead and they weren't. I expect the same would happen
here: programmers would say "yeah, my menu is complicated, but you can
just middle-click".

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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