http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=547075 User ian.cheong@acm.org added comment http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=547075#c25 --- Comment #25 from Ian Cheong <ian.cheong@acm.org> 2009-10-21 18:23:16 MDT --- (In reply to comment #24)
Anyway, I would like to hear you expand your opinion on the check boxes. This is a commonly used element on package managers. Is it your view that they should be done with, or the semantics changed?
I have been reading on human interface design for a long time. Donald Norman's books "The design of everyday things" and "Things that make us smart" are seminal. (Donald Norman happened to be an Apple Fellow along time ago and later moved to HP.) Human interface design in daily living is often broken still today. More people should read Norman's easy to read works.
From a user perspective, functionality as exposed by controls should be simple and intuitive and even impossible to get wrong. "Affordances" is the relevant jargon term.
A screen with a tab that says "undo" and visible buttons that say "uncouple" "install" "undo" "cancel" and "apply" is not entirely clear. As I said, Apple Human Interface Guidelines and Apple's 15 years of experience designing GUIs are based on sound basic principles. openSUSE does not have to copy, but should to at least consider all the issues solved by a document like Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and come up with its own principles. Without clear agreed guiding principles for usability, much human effort will be wasted travelling down blind pathways. On checkboxes, one has to decide if it is the most universally applicable selection metaphor. Most GUIs use highlighting across *all* aspects of the interface (text, icons, lists, objects, etc) to indicate selection. So what is the rationale for using a checkbox instead, expecially when the semantics of "tick" and "cross" are overloaded???? -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.