[Gimp-developer] Another new image dialog mockup
I took a look at the new image dialogs on the list today, and I made a few improvements. I've posted them at http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogSimple.png and http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogExpanded.png and for the curious, glade files at http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/newdialog.glade http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/newdialog.gladep I've tried very hard to make sure they conform to the HIG, which wasn't easy because there are a few bugs in the HIG where different sections conflict. I like these mockups a lot and I think you will too. I don't have time to say more about them today because I have a train to catch, but I will say a little more about them tomorrow. Rockwalrus ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] Another new image dialog mockup
Hi, Nathan Carl Summers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Sorry, but I fail to see any improvements in these mockups. > > Honestly, I would have expected you to reply in a more thoughtful and > constructive manner. It's obvious that I spent some time (hours, > actually) constructing this mockup, and that I didn't think that my > choices were stupid, yet it really feels like you have dismissed them all > out of hand. This is exactly the reason GIMP has problems attracting and > retaining new contributors. Well, my response was a little longer than the one sentence you quoted and it did include my reasons to not accept any of the changes you suggested. When I looked at your mockup my first impression was that this dialog looks unbalanced, confusing and cluttered. That's of course a question of taste also, but it should make you think about whether your mockup is really an improvement. I think it isn't, for the reasons given. Your unpleasantly long mail also didn't convince me. It made me understand the reasons for adding the warning icon but with all the visual clutter it bring to the dialog, I don't see it being important enough to be added. I understand that you feel dismissed since you put some work into this but I think you should show the same respect to other people's work that you expect for your's. Sometimes things just don't work out and hours of work have to be thrown away. Happens every day. There's no reason to get pissy about that. Sven ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] Another new image dialog mockup
Hi, Nathan Carl Summers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Screen estate is really a non-issue here. Even with the ridiculously > bloated theme that comes with Glade for Windows (yeah, yeah, buy me a T1 > so I can do this kind of stuff at home on my beloved Debian Sarge box > instead of at work) the fully-expanded dialog is by default 344 x 521 > pixels, which means that it will fit on any display bigger than 640 x 480. > Actually, it will even fit on a 640 x 480 display, since the somewhat > ungraceful behavior of the dialog is to clip the bottom part if there > isn't enough space allocated. If your display adaptor can't do 640 x 480, > you will have bigger problems with GIMP than just the new image dialog > going off the screen. I wasn't talking about dialog size here. The point is that the memory size label is probably the least important thing in this dialog while your mockup gives it the most prominent appearance. If the label is really so difficult to understand then it should be removed. I do however think that most users will understand it as it is. Perhaps it should be put in italics so it looks less like the other labels? > When the icon changes to the warning icon, that is distracting, but > it is so on purpose. The same kind of feedback could be achieved by changing the label to bold or adding an exlamation mark. Simple, small and effective. > > Centering the unit menu next to the size entries does IMO look > > horrible since it deviates from the table layout of the dialog. > > However, aesthetics was not the reason I made this change; there is > a much more important usability factor involved here. As the HIG > states, "Visual design is not just about making your application > look pretty. Good visual design is about communication. A > well-designed application will make it easy for the user to > understand the information that is being presented, and show them > clearly how they can interact with that information." The changes I > made make the dialog much more effective at communicating to the > user the mechanics of the dialog. Right, that's why for a group of X/Y controls we put the label at the upper left and the unit menu at the lower right. That's how the user scans the dialog. It's also the reason that the OK button is located at the lower right of the dialog. > The problem here is that the existing layout breaks a cardinal rule > of any kind of layout: the dialog elements are not treated > consistently. The controls in the "Image Size" and "Advanced" > groups are labelled with headings, but the template control has no > heading at all. This lack of balance makes the template dropdown > look like an afterthought. Originally I simply bolded the Template: > label, which made it look more balanced, but the dropdown still > looked out of place, so I indented it. The unit control is a single item, not a group of controls. It thus doesn't deserve a group label. The way it is presented now gives it less weight than the "Image Size" controls. That's good because the Image size is the most important part of the dialog and should be what the user looks at first. > Placing the template as part of the size group won't work because > the template influences more things than just the size. I also > don't think that templates should be place in the Advanced group. It also won't work for technical reasons. The template menu is not part of the GimpTemplateEditor widget. > > I think Jimmac and Tigert did a very good jo with their mockup and > > I don't see much room for improvement. IMHO we should stick to it. > > This sounds very closed minded. The dialog proposed by Jimmac and > Tigert was a big improvement over the old one, but to say there is > hardly any room for improvement smacks of hubris. Even if you > didn't see any room for improvement when you wrote that, it does not > in any way mean that there in reality isn't any, or even that you > won't see any room after more discussion. I don't see much room for improvement. But that doesn't mean that I don't think that it could be further discussed. I didn't put an end to the discussion, I only told you my opinions on your mockup. Would you have preferred if I had simply ignored it? However, I think it would make much more sense to now think about the other dialogs that need to be converted. As soon as we are through with all of them, we will have collected more experience with the new HIG layout and can start the process all over. That will certainly bring us further more quickly. Sticking to an endless discussion of the File-New dialog might bring us the perfect dialog but it will leave the rest of the application looking like shit. Our schedule for 2.2 doesn't leave us much time, we need to get things into a reasonable state soon. Noone says that things can't be changed again later. But I'd rather not do too many changes to the dialogs in this development cycle. Keeping some of the established user interface elements will the s
Re: [Gimp-developer] Another new image dialog mockup
Hi, Nathan Carl Summers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I took a look at the new image dialogs on the list today, and I made > a few improvements. I've posted them at > > http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogSimple.png and > http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogExpanded.png Sorry, but I fail to see any improvements in these mockups. The icon next to the memory size as well as the bold label "Memory Required" don't add any value, waste screen estate and distract from the important parts of the dialog. Centering the unit menu next to the size entries does IMO look horrible since it deviates from the table layout of the dialog. Using a frame for the template selection seems wrong because a frame's supposed to group elements. The template menu is a single element and in your mockup it stands completely unlabelled. I think Jimmac and Tigert did a very good jo with their mockup and I don't see much room for improvement. IMHO we should stick to it. Sven ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] Another new image dialog mockup
On 7 May 2004, Sven Neumann wrote: > Hi, > > Nathan Carl Summers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > I took a look at the new image dialogs on the list today, and I made > > a few improvements. I've posted them at > > > > http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogSimple.png and > > http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogExpanded.png > > Sorry, but I fail to see any improvements in these mockups. Honestly, I would have expected you to reply in a more thoughtful and constructive manner. It's obvious that I spent some time (hours, actually) constructing this mockup, and that I didn't think that my choices were stupid, yet it really feels like you have dismissed them all out of hand. This is exactly the reason GIMP has problems attracting and retaining new contributors. I'm sure if you have asked yourself why I was suggesting the things that I was, what you would have said would have been more reasonable, or at least more reasoned. You know that I am not an idiot. You also know that I spent three months as an intern in a usability lab, so I'm not completely clueless about the topic. If you failed to see any improvements, you also failed to see why others might think that there are, and to identify the principles behind which the changes were made. Not only that, you didn't give me the opportunity to comment more on them (like I said I would) before summarily dismissing them. That is more than bad intellectual practice; it is bad leadership. That said, here is my responce to you comments. > The icon next to the memory size as well as the bold label "Memory > Required" don't add any value The icon adds value in two major ways: 1. It provides instantaneous feedback about whether memory usage would be above the threshold set in the user preferences. This is a usability win, since it allows the user to immediately fix the mistake instead of having to re-open the new image dialog after the warning comes up as a separate alert as in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21028 and the user cancels the image creation. Note that it's still a good practice to have the alert box come up as a double-check that the user wants to create an overly large image, even if they have already been warned here in the new dialog. 2. In its normal usage, the icon immediately identifies the corresponding controls as being informational and not directly manipulable. Since the general layout is consistent with other GTK applications, instead of distracting the user, it allows the user to immediately recognize that in order to get the work done, the user needs to manipulate the controls in the other sections of the dialog. It would take a higher level of processing to identify the purpose of the section if the icon were not present, or if it were not placed where it was. > wastes screen estate Screen estate is really a non-issue here. Even with the ridiculously bloated theme that comes with Glade for Windows (yeah, yeah, buy me a T1 so I can do this kind of stuff at home on my beloved Debian Sarge box instead of at work) the fully-expanded dialog is by default 344 x 521 pixels, which means that it will fit on any display bigger than 640 x 480. Actually, it will even fit on a 640 x 480 display, since the somewhat ungraceful behavior of the dialog is to clip the bottom part if there isn't enough space allocated. If your display adaptor can't do 640 x 480, you will have bigger problems with GIMP than just the new image dialog going off the screen. Since the new image dialog is unlikely to be open very long, how much it occludes other windows that are in use is unlikely to be an important consideration. Even if real estate was an issue, the mockup in total is 32 pixels longer than the screenshot you posted yesterday. The difference in real-estate usage is not that great, and would probably be mitigated almost completely if the same theme was used in both screenshots. I should note that the screenshot posted yesterday wouldn't fit on a 640 x 480 display, either. Regardless of whether minimizing screen estate is a priority for the new image dialog, given the previously discussed utility of the icon, I would argue that it is a very effective use of real estate. In fact, I experimented with several layouts for the memory required portion of the dialog. Some had icons and some did not. For those that did have icons, I experimented with the size of the icon and with hiding it when the memory requirements did not exceed the threshold. This layout was by far the most effective, and that is why it is the one that you see. It is the most effective because it is a slightly miniaturized version of the standard HIG information window layout, and so, since it is consistent with other applications, it is immediately identified by the user for what it really is. Furthermore, the icon area is designed so that it can accommodate vast changes to the size of the dialog while still being
Re: [Gimp-developer] Another new image dialog mockup
* Nathan Carl Summers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [040508 03:31]: > On 7 May 2004, Sven Neumann wrote: > > Hi, > > Nathan Carl Summers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > I took a look at the new image dialogs on the list today, and I made > > > a few improvements. I've posted them at > > > > > > http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogSimple.png and > > > http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogExpanded.png > > > > Centering the unit menu next to the size entries does IMO look horrible > > since it deviates from the table layout of the dialog. > > A slightly ironic comment, since the centering was implemented using > GtkTable. :) > > With the units dropdowns positioned the way they currently are, it is not > immediately apparent that they apply to both of the entries. Aligning the > dropdowns with the bottom entry is especially bad because the first entry > is completely scanned before the dropdown is scanned. By aligning the > controls the way that they are, it take a lot more processing to realize > that the units dropdown applies to the entry above as well. This > processing has to take place at a very high level; it requires actual > conscious thought. To communicate less effectively, the dropdown would > have be be located in a completely separate part of the dialog from the > entries it affects. > > By far the best layout is to center the control, because then the > applicability to both elements is most obvious. The human visual system > groups all three controls together, and so it would take conscious > processing to disassociate them instead; in other words, you get the > association for free. A distant second best would be to align the units > dropdown with the topmost entry instead of the bottommost. That way still > requires some conscious processing, but at least one wouldn't have to > backtrack to find which entries the dropdown applies to. One of my comments on irc was that I'd like the units dropdown aligned with the entries for width/height, for the same reason of visual grouping. I fail to see the need for the layout of the dialog to even resemble a table. If that was an argument, one could as well argue for keeping the entry boxes of width/height, and Res.X / Res.Y, the same width, and horizontally aligned, this adds nothing but "stiffness" to the dialog. > > Using a frame for the template selection seems wrong because a frame's > > supposed to group elements. The template menu is a single element > > The problem here is that the existing layout breaks a cardinal rule of any > kind of layout: the dialog elements are not treated consistently. The > controls in the "Image Size" and "Advanced" groups are labelled with > headings, but the template control has no heading at all. This lack of > balance makes the template dropdown look like an afterthought. Originally > I simply bolded the Template: label, which made it look more balanced, but > the dropdown still looked out of place, so I indented it. >snip< > I agree that a label would make the dropdown seem less out of place, but I > left one off for the simple reason that I couldn't think of a good one. > Perhaps "Apply:" would work here? Or perhaps the heading should be > something else and the label would be "Template:" The titles of the frames can actually be seen as section headings in a text, the body of the first section in Nathan's screenshot is a single dropdown widget. I would find this quite intuitive; the reason I would is probably that I am used to read books and other written material using standard typographical means to group and organize different elements. He also seems to have added some more vertical space (air) before each heading this adds further to visual grouping and increases readability. (this might be a theme issue though). There is one issue I have with both this Nathan and Svens screenshots, The header for the 'Image Size' group and the 'Advanced' are not aligned which each other (at least not when processed by my visual system), the fact that the labels in Nathans screenshot is not directly aligned with the beginning of the word Advanced helps a little, but I would prefer to put the expander triangle 'in the margin' thereby having all the group headings aligned. (mockup from Sven's version at http://freedesktop.org/~pippin/gimp-new-image-mod.png ) /pippin -- .^. /V\Øyvind Kolås, Gjøvik University College, Norway /(_)\ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ^ ^ ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] Another new image dialog mockup
On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 21:06 -0700, Nathan Carl Summers wrote: > I took a look at the new image dialogs on the list today, and I made a few > improvements. I've posted them at > http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogSimple.png and > http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogExpanded.png To only give you constructive crits. The template control is not accessible with a mnemonic. If it used only a label, it would then go against the suggestion not to mix framed an unframed elements. Yup, that's why we ended up putting it in the size frame. The memory requirement may be a good improvement. However the size of the thing scares me. It really adds visual noise and I feel the icon grabbing more attention than anything else. The most important thing on the dialog remains the dimensions. cheers -- Jakub Steiner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
Re: [Gimp-developer] Another new image dialog mockup
On 8 May 2004, at 19:51, Jakub Steiner wrote: > On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 21:06 -0700, Nathan Carl Summers wrote: > > I took a look at the new image dialogs on the list today, and I made > > a few improvements. I've posted them at > > http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogSimple.png and > > http://wilber.gimp.org/~rock/NewDialogExpanded.png > > To only give you constructive crits. The template control is not > accessible with a mnemonic. If it used only a label, it would then go > against the suggestion not to mix framed an unframed elements. Yup, > that's why we ended up putting it in the size frame. > > The memory requirement may be a good improvement. However the size of > the thing scares me. It really adds visual noise and I feel the icon > grabbing more attention than anything else. The most important thing > on the dialog remains the dimensions. At the moment you are getting that warning, surely the warning is the most important thing in the dialog? Perhaps you should not mix and match error dialogs with other types of dialogs, but conjuring up an extra dialog for the warning would seem overkill to me. If you want to plan for the contingency that the user accidentally or purposely chooses a image size that is larger than his/her indicated preference, you could allow the user several options upon receiving the warning: 1) Ignore warning, 2) Suggest size. In both cases, you could remove the warning from the dialog. In essence the dialog would become an image creation wizard, but then again, chances of this happening are fairly low. -- branko collin [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
