unity-design team mailing list archive

[Diego Moya <turingt@xxxxxxxxx>]

2010/5/3 Martín Soto wrote:
> Providing tools people can install to satisfy specialized needs is the Right
> Thing to Do (TM). Trying to support  specialized needs in the default user
> interface at the expense of a large majority of users is just plain wrong.

I agree, as long as installing special tools is made insanely easy.
Firefox add-ons is the role model of how to do this.


>
>>  * It is easy to have a central place to control the sound, like Chow
>> Loong Jin already said. It's no use to go through all tabs and writing
>> a Firefox plugin doesn't provide much consistency and still isn't
>> central.
>
> The book "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman explains this
> issue quite well (look for term "mapping"). More direct, spatial connections
> between controls and the items they control can improve interaction quite a
> lot.

Norman's direct mapping would be the best model if each application
had volume completely independent of each other. This isn't true
though, as there is a system-wide volume control that changes all
applications at once, thus making individual application volumes
relative to each other.

A centralized control that shows in one place the relative weights of
all applications is a good design in this case, IMHO. This way one can
give more or less emphasis to one application with respect to the
others, without having to switch between applications.

This doesn't means one couldn't also have one standard application
volume control for each application as a windicator; in this case,
having redundant controls wouldn't hurt - as they support different
use cases (controlling sound in the current application vs setting
global sound preferences).