Subject: Usability: mixed metaphors, anchor/bookmark silliness
From: Alan Horkan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Sun Nov 18 2001 - 14:45:44 CST
despite the effort i put into drawing a nice anchor it looks ridiculous
when its labelled as a bookmark, and the icon should be changed (or the
label).
The way hoped it would be used was beside the chain representing the hyper
'link' and the anchor representing the hypertext anchor.
I think these two are stong clever metaphors.
i think a globe with an arrow on it is not a good metaphor, although the
Bookmark metaphor is definately clearer and more obvious than the Anchor
metaphor.
Remember there are more people out there who have never used computers
than those that have.
Granted the chain icon was remarkably similar to the one used by another
project which could potetially have caused problems.
If anyone is involved in mozilla i would like to go on record saying the
icon is in the public domain and may be used by whoever want to use it,
and id love to see it used in Mozilla (or Netscape).
So is there a better way?
Should i try again and draw another Chain and Anchor that fit in with the
new Gnome Icons?
We also seem to have regressed from our lovely speech bubble Help icon to
the old ugly boring question mark icon (at least on win32). Hopefully the
old version is still is in CVS, and maybe it should be passed along to
Gnome they can share the wealth.
I would also really like to see the current toolbars subdivided into more
smaller toolbars as the toolbars are too wide for small displays, which is
a nasty usability bug. I realise this problem will be reduced by the
customisable menus feature, or even alomst eliminated iff custom menus
allow you to create you own extra custom toolbars, but that does not get
rid of the need for sensible defaults.
I try to use abiword with the text labels on, as it gives lazy old me
bigger buttons to hit and its faster to read the text than to try and
decipher what some of the icons mean.
Currently there is no way to turn this on other than by editing the
Abiword.Profile, it seems a shame to waste a feature that has already been
implemented.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan <horkana@tcd.ie>
PS dont anybody take my criticisms personally. id try and make some of
these changes myself if i thought i could code well enough.
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