Subject: Re: UI design Q -- do people like "sticky" settings?
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 01:32:56 CST
At 03:03 AM 2/29/00 +0000, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
>Well, the reason I can't think of anything is that the question is not
>very specific. Would this stickiness apply only to bizarre editing modes
>that only hackers would ever use, or to paragraph settings, styles, etc. I
>am not a fan of stickiness in general, but if it is only for editing modes
>I don't have much against it. Right now I can't seem to think of any other
>preference item where stickiness would be good.
OK, here's a more specific description. The proposed 1.0 UI has a number of
frame-level settings which can be directly manipulated as follows:
View / Toolbars / Standard
View / Toolbars / Formatting
View / Rulers
View / Status Bar
View / Show Paragraphs
View / Header and Footer
View / Zoom
Reasoning by analogy to other MSDI interfaces (especially web browsers), my
assertion is that changes to any of these settings should immediately become
the new default behavior. In other words, the change:
- should affect the current frame
- should NOT affect any other open frames
- should affect any future frames opened during this session
- should also affect frames opened in future sessions
By extension, I'm also suggesting that similar logic would apply to the
following keyboard-driven settings:
- F12, which rotates keybinding modes (iff Kevin Vajk's flag is set)
- INS, which toggles overwrite mode
In other words, each of these frame-level settings is "sticky" until it gets
changed again.
common characteristics
----------------------
1. These are all direct-manipulation settings. In each case, the current
state can always be directly inspected (via a checked menu or a status bar
pane). Likewise, they can be changed directly via a menu or keybinding.
2. None of these settings affect document content directly: they're all
attributes of the viewport people use to manipulate their documents.
bottom line
-----------
I believe that the user experience will be a lot more predictable if all
settings in this category share a common level of stickiness. Barring
serious objections now, I'm proposing that we implement this style of
consistency now and see how it "feels" for everyone.
If it still feels broken later on, we can entertain other proposals for how
these behaviors should work.
How does that sound?
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Feb 29 2000 - 01:27:24 CST