On 5 Sep 2008, at 19:26, Jacob Beauregard wrote:
Could my prior use of other media players seriously be this deeply ingrained in my head? I'm doubtful. What are the other possibilities?
Donald Norman would describe what you're experiencing in terms of "the gulf of execution"[1]. Your goal is to pause (or stop) the music, so your gut reaction is to look for a pause/stop button. But there isn't one, so the gulf is widened.
Partly this probably is due to your past experience with other media players, but most likely also with GUIs generally-- GUIs tend to represent actions as buttons; binary toggles are normally reserved for settings and properties. What do you do when you want to stop other continuous operations, like a file transfer or a print job? You press the "Stop" (or "Cancel") button, you don't un-press the Start button :)
Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GNOME Desktop Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
