Listmembers: For some time now I've noticed that quite some of TB!'s dialogs have a tab order that is far from logical. For example, look at these two pages from the folder properties dialog:
'General' page Press tab: no idea where I am now, no control appears active, arrows or keys (except Enter) have no effect Press tab: you land on 'Name' (correct) Press tab: you land on 'Parent folder' (correct) Press tab: you land on 'Browse' (correct) Press tab: jumps to 'Copy to...' (illogical) Press tab: you land on 'Edit View Mode' (logical from last position) Press tab: jumps back to 'Show unread messages on MailTicker(tm) (illogical) Press tab: goes to 'Use folder-specific print settings' (logical from last position) Now, make sure that this option is selected, the next tab should go to the 'Print Settings' button, but: Press tab: jumps to 'Column settings' selection list (illogical) Press tab: jumps to 'Default charset' selection list (illogical, but considering that 'Copy to' and 'Edit View Mode' were already visited, this is to be expected now). Press tab: jumps back to 'Print Settings' (illogical) Press tab: goes to 'Quick reply settings' (logical) This completes the controls in this page of the dialog. Further tabs go to 'OK', 'Cancel', 'Help', and 'Watched by...' in that order, where you could argue that maybe 'Watched by...' should have come first. After tabbing through the buttons at the bottom, you are returned to the page selection list on the left. 'Additional' page First tab once again goes to no-mans land. The next few tabs are logical for 'Directory', 'Browse' and 'Clear'. The next tab jumps to 'Remove old messages', logically followed by 'Compact folder' Assuming the checkboxes for both 'Maximum number of stored messages' and 'Keep messages in the base for (days)' are checked: The next tab makes the illogical jump to the number of stored messages. The next tab makes the illogical jump to the number of days to keep messages in the base. The next tab jumps back to the checkbox for Maximum number of stored messages. The next tab jumps forward to the checkbox for 'Keep messages in the base for (days)' I have also seen dialogs where the tab order has suddenly changed from what it used to be for no apparent reason. For instance, when editing a contact and going to the group membership dialog, Shift-Tab once used to land you on the list of groups, whereas it now makes the illogical jump to the 'New...' button. I cannot imagine that I'm the only one who is not in the habit of grabbing my mouse for every single dialog control that I want to go to. Can we please get a little more attention for these usability issues? It's small annoyances like this where programs behave different from what people expect that can make new users quickly dismiss a piece of software that they are evaluating. Note that these are just examples of dialogs where I have seen illogical tab orders. There are probably many more places where things like this are happening. Hopefully Ritlabs are not going to ask me to document every illogical tab order situation there is. -- Greetings, Maurice Windows 7 6.1 Build 7601 Service Pack 1 The Bat! v5.1.6.13; AJS v0.48; MyMacros 1.11a; Using OTFE with Aladdin eToken Pro 32k ________________________________________________________ Current beta is 5.1.6.15 | 'Using TBBETA' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
