unity-design team mailing list archive

[Chow Loong Jin <hyperair@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 20,April,2010 05:53 PM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> 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.

I don't quite see the similarity between the Applications menu and the
application indicators, really. But I do see the similarity between a toolbar
icon that has a menu, and an application indicator.

The Applications menu has an icon *and* text. Application indicators have icons
as the buttons instead of text, and unlike toolbar icons, they do not have
tooltips. In this aspect, I can only see application indicators as the bastard
child of menus and toolbar icons.

An aforementioned example of a menu that does not use text in its menu buttons
was Google Chromium, but its menu comes from a toolbar button, not a menu button
-- it lives on the toolbar.

> [...]


-- 
Kind regards,
Chow Loong Jin

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