On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 12:00, Fons Adriaensen wrote: > On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 06:54:20PM +0200, Thorsten Wilms wrote: > > > Requiring the user to read documentation to learn about functionality > > he would not even expect is not an option. > > Have education levels gone down *that* far ?
It is not necessarily about education. If you make a widget such that you have to read docs to use it fully, then you have to translate your docs into N languages. If you just make it self-explanatory, then you are done. Of course this requires more thought in the design. I think this is a lot of the reason European (especially Dutch) design is so much more advanced than American. In the States, a fire exit sign says 'EXIT'. In the Netherlands, it is an icon that unmistakably means 'this way out', without any text required. This is *much* harder to do than just 'EXIT' in big red letters, but required. If there is a fire in Amsterdam for example, you will have people from 5-10 different countries running for the exit. It will not always be possible to make the interface 100% self-explanatory. The canonical example of this is that there is no good icon that unambiguously represents 'Undo'. With regards to radial movement, the only self-explanatory way to do it that I have seen is mousewheel-on-mouseover. People will figure this out with no documentation at all. Please make your radial controls work this way unless there is a good reason not to. Lee
