…ah, screw those nihilists and just double-press® the clicker on your right earbud and skip the dammed track.

somehow I just did it out of intuition, i probably lived with too many apple (computer), inc products for too long. So if you find this tip useful, please let us know what track you were trying to skip and we’ll feel for you.

I am sure there are different uses for it…

I dropped all of adobe’s icons in the doc to see how confusing they would be.

This is the wheel that is the justification or system for the icons.

the discussion is ongoing…

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I am seeing a lot of Yes/No button labels (when replacing a previous workspace for instance). It’s not good form to use those. It’s much quicker for users to assess an actionable term like “replace” on a button and act on it. “Yes / No buttons” require the user to read and understand the entire error message and then make the mental leap to agree or disagree with it, thus slow down the user interaction and make more room for error.

There was a story involving an euthanasia machine made by an Australian doctor connected to a Windows terminal, that drove the point home. After choosing cancel it would ask:

Are you sure you don’t want to kill yourself? Yes / No

Much more clear:

Are you sure you don’t want to kill yourself? I want to live / I want to die

Button placement can be a time sucker too: On Mac Os the default button is on the right, because people (exceptions for some languages) tend to read from left to right. They also scan the buttons left to right, so it makes the most sense to use the space on the right for the button most often used, instead of having to track back all the way to the left (a la Windows).

It would be great if you could avoid yes/no dialogs, use descriptive button labels and place the default button on the right.

It’s been a while since system 7, but a lot of these conventions now make as much sense as they did then.

Example of a bad dialogue, by the new Adobe Reader 8:

Thanks for listening,

Florian Fangohr

honest communications
for a better tomorr[oh]

http://fangohr.com

“Since refining the FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) sensing technique, we’ve been experimenting with a wide variety of application scenarios and interaction modalities that utilize multi-touch input information. These go far beyond the “poking” actions you get with a typical touchscreen, or the gross gesturing found in video-based interactive interfaces. It is a rich area for research, and we are extremely excited by its potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and intuitiveness. It’s also just so much fun!“

it sure looks like it. the new ideas like the slingshot are awesome. let’s hope not everything here is going to be locked away in the corporate patent safe…

• radial menus can (if the number of items contained in them isn’t much higher than 10) be operated a more efficiently than linear menus (palettes) because directions are easier to remember and reproduce than distances: moving the input device in a direction and clicking vs locating the palette moving the cursor slowing down, aiming then clicking.

• radial menus can be designed to take advantage of fitts’s law*, making one or two edges of the button unlimitedly ‘long’. alias is using this in maya’s implementation: the idea is that you can overshoot the slice of the cake/button and the selection is still valid, because it’s the biggest slice of cake in the universe.

• radial menus tend to be implemented to appear on keystrokes, near or underneath the users cursor which makes travelling distances unnecessary, resulting in faster operation. depending on implementation they can be navigated without looking at the screen after the user is familiar with the directions and tools.

• since radial menus are often only visible when invoked they don’t cover up the working document and give you more screen real estate. on the down side the learning curve is higher because they aren’t always visible.

*fitts’s law (the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target) dictates that a button is a lot more useful when it borders to one or two sides of the screen because you can slam your mouse against the side of the screen (the target area can be considered infinitely long) without having to be afraid to miss the menu. this is why the screen corners are so attractive for menus because they easily ‘trap’ your cursor. a good example is the apple menu, the windows start button doesn’t take advantage of fitts’s law, because it has ‘dead’, i.e. non-clickable frame around it.