Hi Ivan, hi T. J.,

nice idea - just a few comments on that.

Am Samstag, den 07.02.2009, 22:19 +1300 schrieb Ivan M:
> > Could you change the icon color, differentiating between "logged in" and
> > "not" ? Light green, maybe, or silver; or white would certainly do in a
> > pinch. The idea is that yellow is a warning color, of sorts, and should be
> > replaced by something non-warning on successful login. As well, the user now
> > must focus on, and read, the text to determine the status. With a
> > color-change, a quick glance would do it.

T.J., I'm happy that someone notices that in the "general color
language" yellow is somehow related to warnings. Unfortunately, today
the industry does somehow ignore this basic principle - e.g. most people
don't understand that red lamps in cars are related to warnings because
many car manufacturers use red backlighting, sigh. Sorry, a little bit
off-topic.

For OOo, the yellow "user" is already known on the homepage
http://www.openoffice.org - have a look at "How to participate". The
different colors in the icon symbolize different users. So my initial
thought concerning your proposal was: changing the color of the log-in
icon will change the person who sits in front of the computer ;-)

At the moment, the icons are used like descriptive text. No icon changes
it's appearance, e.g. the world globe will stay the same for all NLC
pages, the magnifier glass doesn't indicate that something has been
searched. So here we add a status information to the icon. (This is not
bad, but I want to point out this difference.)

Your suggestion would lead to the following behavior (just to be sure):
      * Status Logged Out: Yellow user icon (anonymous), icon links to
        log-in page. 
      * Status Logged In: Green user icon (known user), icon links to
        "My Pages".

My proposal: To promote the color green, it would be nice to add this
green "user" graphic to "My Pages". Or, I suggest that we add a green
check mark to the yellow user to indicate that (s)he is known.

Ivan, because we are discussing the icons. The current "Languages
Projects" icon looks a bit weird on the IE6 - it seems to be the PNG
transparency bug. The other icons don't have this problem, do they
provide the corresponding background color?

Bye and thank you,
Christoph

-- 
Usability * Productivity * Enjoyment

OpenOffice.org User Experience Team
http://ux.openoffice.org


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