unity-design team mailing list archive

["Stefanos A." <stapostol@xxxxxxxxx>]

> *Some* windows are ok to resize, because for those windows, the
> probability that people would resize them deliberately
> multiplied by the benefit from doing so is greater than the
> probability that people would resize them accidentally
> multiplied by the pain from doing so.

I disagree with the core of this assumption. If a window becomes painful
when resize, then that window is broken, period. It should be redesigned to
work correctly when resized.

> For other kinds of window the inequality tips the other way --
> usually as a result of resizing being much less useful, and
> sometimes also as a result of a usability benefit from all
> windows of the same type always being the same size for instant
> recognizability (which increases the pain of resizing them by
> mistake, as they then become less recognizable). Examples of the
> former include properties windows, preference dialogs, and most
> individual control panels; examples of the latter include alerts
> and progress windows.

You can achieve instant recognizability by opening all related windows (e.g.
alerts) at the same initial size. Your argument makes a huge logical jump in
saying that these windows should be fixed-size (instead of resizable with
identical initial size). If a user choose to resize such a window it's
because she has a reason to do so. Disallowing this *probably* prohibits the
user from doing something he needed to do.

Concrete example: the language support dialog that reads "The language
support is not installed completely". This is a fixed-size dialog has a
2-line listbox that contains more than 10 lines of text, something that
falls somewhere between "completely broken" and "impossible to use". You
simply don't have enough space to display all necessary information - and by
making the window non-resizable, you prohibit the user from accessing the
information necessary for an informed decision (install / cancel). Awesome.

How should I approach these bugs? Open a single bug report about all
non-resizable applications (and be ignored or told to file separate bugs?)
Open a new bug report for each broken non-resizable application (only to be
told to file upstream?) File reports upstream (and be told these are by
design?)

That's why I posted here first instead of filing bugs directly. Unless there
is a tangible discussion on the design of resizable vs non-resizable
windows, any related bug reports are just going to be ignored.

tl;dr Several non-resizable windows are unusable in their default state and
size. We can either fix the symptoms (change each non-resizable window to
fit) and keep doing that for each new case that is reported; or we can fix
the root and banish any unnecessary non-resizable windows to the usability
hell they spawned from.