From: Alan Horkan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Wed Aug 28 2002 - 11:22:23 EDT
On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Joaquin Cuenca Abela wrote:
> Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 08:06:17 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Joaquin Cuenca Abela <e98cuenc@yahoo.com>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@tcd.ie>
> Cc: abiword-dev@nyorp.abisource.com
> Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: AbiWord Font Usability question
>
>
> --- Alan Horkan <horkana@tcd.ie> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> >
> > > Instead I propose to only include 5-8 MRU items in
> > the font pulldown
> > > menu (organized alphabetically, to organize by
> > recency of use will
> > > probably only serve to confuse), then a seperator
> > then "Other Fonts..."
> >
> > probably?
> > anything to back this up?
>
> Yes. It's a known fact (at least by computer
please dont say stuff like that without a link or some sort of a reference
> interface guys) that MRU usually causes more harm than
> good.
> The problem is that if the menu items (or combo box
> items, etc) are not fixed, the user has no
> oportunities at all to *remember* where this or that
> item was.
> For instance, in recent versions of word, the menus
> only show the most used items. More than half the
> time when the menu popups I spend ~2 seconds just to
> scan the list of items (one after one) just to see if
> my item is already there.
i dont think you are comparing like to like. I hate Microsoft hiding
menu items on me, i think this says it best "You hardley ever use that
fire extinguisher, i think i will hide it for you". I hate that menu
hiding stuff and i have to use a default configuration here that i am not
allowed to change so i have to put up with it.
i was talking specifically about the menus in the toolbars where by
default you only have 5 items by default. with so few items ordering is
not as important.
I can understand the benifit of ordering alphabetically, but if we behave
differently to msword it has to be _significantly better_ not *just as
good* to compensate for the loss of consistancey.
I am just a little annoyed that Seth did not go into a bit more depth and
as an expert could not be more authorative, he just gave another opinion
to help weight the merits of the various decisions. I was hoping for more
information on how and why he advocated his approach. Maybe he will
follow up in more detail, if he can use his reputation and give an
authorative answer i urge him to do so.
Later
Alan
/me not being particularly diplomatic today
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Aug 28 2002 - 11:26:30 EDT