unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 16:53, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

>
> Martín A. Casco wrote on 16/01/11 13:39:
> >
> > Well, for my last mail I've been thinking. Maybe 3 steppers for each
> > scrollbar could be more simple. If we are on the top off apps with the
> > mouse and want to use upper stepper we have to go down with the mouse
> > (thats the concept of my first mockup), this solution its not better at
> > all. So maybe this mockup represents better the concept of simplicity
> > on scrollbar's steppers.
> >...
>
> That's what KDE does. But it goes against the principle of parsimony:
> having two similarly accessible methods of doing the same thing slows
> people down, by making them dither. (For example, it's okay to have a
> title bar close button and a "Close" menu item, but having two close
> buttons is bad. Similarly, having two scroll-up buttons would be bad.)
>

In an ideal world, yes. In our world, we need workarounds for all kinds of
problems, such as misrepresentation of content or antiquted vertical and
horizontal panning widgets.
In this case, i think it is better to see a duplication of methods as the
method itself. We already have scrollbar steppers all over the place in
multiple open windows at a time, sometimes overlapping, and i think that
makes it irrelevant whether they appear once or 100times within one window.

At the end of the day, ideas from ZUI and Semantic Scaling will make content
navigation easier, scrollbars will appear on demand if at alll, they will be
transparent and they will offer semantic relationships to the content they
are meant to help navigate. imo.